Ted Grimsrud

Revelation 3:1-22—Shalom Mennonite Congregation—January 22, 2012

So, what is the book of Revelation really about? Since it has been two months since my last sermon, you all have probably forgotten….Let me suggest one word that I believe is at the center of the book: Power.

We may read Revelation as a book of conflicts—the Beast vs. the Lamb, the Holy Spirit vs. the False Prophet, Babylon vs. the New Jerusalem. The question is: Who is more powerful? Which is actually the question: What kind of power is more powerful —the power to conquer through domination or the power to conquer through self-giving love? On this question hangs the fate of the earth, perhaps we could say. Certainly, for John the writer of Revelation, on this question hangs the fate of the churches.

The seven messages that make up chapters two and three, the first of Revelation’s many visions, set the book’s agenda. In my last sermon, I talked about “power in weakness”—how the little church in Smyrna, besieged, suffering persecution, with little visible power, actually was praised above all the other churches and proclaimed to be rich indeed.

Today, I will focus on “weakness in power”—how the big church in Laodicea, wealthy, comfortable, lacking in nothing, actually was condemned above all the other churches and proclaimed to be “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.”

Revelation 3

Let me read from chapter 3 of Revelation. As I read, think about how power, including riches and wealth, how is power being presented here—What does Jesus recognize as characteristic of true power? And what are seen as actually expressions of weakness? Who’s powerful—and not? Who’s rich—and not?

To the angel of the church in Sardis write: These are the words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars: I know your works; you have a name of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains. Remember what you received and heard; obey it, and repent. If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know when. Yet a few of you have not soiled your clothes; they will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. If you conquer, you will be clothed like them in white robes, and I will not blot your name out of the book of life; I will confess your name before my Father and before the angels.

To Philadelphia write: These are the words of the one who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens. I know your works. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name. I will make those of the synagogue of Satan bow down before your feet. They will learn that I have loved you. Because you have kept my word of patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that will test the inhabitants of the earth. I am coming soon; hold fast to what you have. If you conquer, I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God; you will never go out of it. I will write on you the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem that comes down from heaven, and my own new name.

To Laodicea write: The words of the faithful and true witness, the origin of God’s creation: I know your works; you are neither hot nor cold. Because you are lukewarm, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. For you say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.’ You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich; and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen; and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

So, what do you think? What can we say about power as presented here?

Empire in Revelation

As I have been working with these seven messages to churches in Revelation 2 and 3 this time around, I have been struck more than before with the sense that in these messages, the Roman Empire is everywhere. Each of the seven cities was a center for devotion to the Empire—shrines, temples, monuments. The various strengths and weaknesses in the congregations that the messages speak to are in some sense related to how the congregations navigate being in the midst of empire.

Smyrna and Philadelphia are both small, struggling, fragile congregations. They suffer in large part because their people refused to go along with the Empire’s civil religion, even at the cost of their jobs or more. Thyatira and Pergamum have many who resist bending the knee to Rome. But these congregations also have within them strong voices for going along. Now, in chapter three, we encounter two congregations where the struggle seems to be about over. Sardis has the appearance of being alive, but is actually dead. And Laodicea….

It is no accident that the message to the congregation in Laodicea is the last of the seven. Here, what we see is that the church has, in a genuine sense, actually become Rome. The Laodicean congregation has absorbed the values of Empire so totally that there is no longer any resistance. The Laodicean Christians simply parrot the language of the Empire. In this sense, Laodicea anticipates what will be true for most Christians in later generations. When the soldiers of the Emperor Constantine march to battle the “pagans” in the 4^th century, they are led by banners picturing the cross. What had been a symbol of Rome’s hatred of the way of Jesus, the symbol of crucifixion, the Empire’s violence against God’s own son, became a symbol for God’s blessing on the violence of Empire. And today, so many American churches have right up front in their worship spaces a powerful symbol of imperial violence—the American flag.

How does the Laodicean church understand itself? “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing” (3:17). How does the Roman Empire, in Revelation shown as a great harlot, understand itself? “I rule as a queen; I am no widow, and I will never see grief” (17:7). In both cases, in the visions of Revelation, these smug affirmations of self-sufficiency and autonomy, are turned upside down. The powerful are shown to be weak.

What is it that Empire seeks? What is it that the power of domination, the power of wealth, the power of infinite destructiveness through military hardware—what does this power seek? “To need nothing. To never see grief.”

Empire convinces people to consent to its rule with the promise that those who go along will need nothing, they will never see grief. Power as security. Power as control. Power as certainty. Big promises. But, Empire must crack down, hard on those who challenge its claims. Why? Because such challenges might reveal that the Empire’s “power” actually is weakness. Witness the police brutality in response to the Occupy movement.

The Failure of Domination

One example of how the power of domination is revealed to be weakness is a story James Scott tells in his book, Seeing Like a State. By the late eighteenth century, the scientific revolution was in full sway in western Europe. It found expression in humans relating to the natural world; for example, how people related to the forests of western Europe. People in power came to focus almost entirely on the economic value of forests—the commercial products that could be extracted from the forests, possible tax revenues, ways forests could be exploited to yield profits. “Forests” were no longer thought of as homes to a whole variety of life forms living in ages-old harmony.

The vocabulary changed. “Nature” became “natural resources,” with an emphasis on usefulness for human exploitation. Trees that were understood to have economic value became known as “timber,” while those without such value were labeled “trash trees” or “underbrush.” I remember, much more recently, this same language when I worked in the woods as a logger out in Oregon.

“Scientific forestry” emerged at this time and deeply influenced the landscape of western Europe. In the late 1700s, foresters remade Germany’s forests. They sought a more easily quantified forest through careful cultivation. They cleared the underbrush, reduced the numbers of species (often to monoculture), and did planting simultaneously and in straight rows on large tracts. Eventually, the old-growth forests were transformed into truly “scientific forests,” neat and tidy mono-cultural, even-aged forests.

The initial results from remaking Germany’s forests were spectacular. On an aesthetic level, the regularity and neatness of the appearance of the new forests resonated deeply with the values of modern Europe. At first, the new forests provided economic rewards as well. The Norway spruce became the tree of choice due to its hardiness, rapid growth, and valuable wood.

It took time for the effects of this type of forestry to become apparent. Only after the planting of the second rotation of the spruce did the problems become clear. The first generation had grown well because it benefited from the rich soil left by the old-growth forest in all its diversity. However, after that deposit of nutrients had been exhausted, the output of the forest shrank dramatically. A new German term was coined—Waldsterben (forest death)—to describe the effects.

Weakness in power….We aren’t always as much in control as we think. I recently found the tape of Kathleen and my wedding from years and years and years ago. The impressive thing was that the entire service, from prelude to postlude, took seventeen minutes. I guess we were in a hurry. I tried to script the entire thing—saying several times to our friend Karsten, the MC: “Don’t say ‘welcome,’ that’s too cliché. Say, we’re so happy you all are here or something like that.” So, on the tape, the prelude ends, and Karsten steps to the mike. “On behalf of Kathleen and Ted, welcome.”…I did still manage to have fun, even if I wasn’t in control, even if my power was weak….

The Critique of Laodicea

So, Jesus here in Revelation 3 is fairly ruthless in his treatment of the Laodicean congregation. It is a useless church, he says. Imagine being thirsty and taking a deep draught of what you expect to be a refreshing beverage. But it’s lukewarm, kind of like old bath water. Blecchh!! You have to spit it out. What is this stuff??

This message reflects quite a bit of knowledge about the city of Laodicea. It had to pipe its water from a long distance away and when the water arrived it was lukewarm. It had to be heated or cooled to be usable.

The city of Laodicea was known for several particular characteristics. It was wealthy, much more than surrounding cities. Its wealth, came in part, from its textile industry, and in part because it was a medical center that trained physicians and produced a widely used treatment for eye problems. Presumably, the people in the congregation themselves directly benefitted from Laodicean wealth.

So, when it comes to the warnings in the message, John’s Jesus could not have been more cutting. You claim to need nothing, he sneers, but in reality you are wretched and pitiable. You are poor. You are naked. You can’t see.

The power you hoard and depend on—power that allows you to rest comfortably in the secure arms of the Pax Romana, in the secure arms of the domination system that Empire creates—this power is nothing. In fact, it’s worse than nothing. Because you believe the lies of the False Prophet. You can not, by brute force and coercion create genuine security and hope. All you can create is an illusion—like the illusion in Germany’s Black Forest that through “scientific forestry” they could create an economic gravy train without end. It didn’t last long—nor did Rome’s “griefless” domination—nor did the self-sufficiency of the Laodicean congregation.

We see this same dynamic first hand in the United States today. After World War II, the U.S. certainly could say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” Unlike the other great powers whose economies were devastated, ours prospered. And we stood on the moral high ground as the great democracy that had stopped the terrible tyrants of Germany and Japan. But the U.S. did not use this power, prosperity, and prestige to move toward a world order based on peace and cooperation. We set out right away on a project of domination. We were wealthy and powerful enough to retain our dominant status for a generation or so. But things have been spiraling out of control for some time. We don’t seem to be able to free ourselves from the tenacious hold of militarism even as the military-industrial complex moves the entire nation to disaster.

Hope for Laodiceans

The book of Revelation, though, for all its hostility toward the Beast, for all its urgency to challenge its readers decisively to turn from weakness in power toward power in weakness, to turn from the coercive conquering modeled by Babylon to the conquering through healing love modeled by the New Jerusalem—and make no mistake, Revelation’s urgency is genuine and must be embraced. Still, Revelation is not without hope even for the kings of the earth—as we will see later in the book.

Most importantly, though, as the letter to Laodicea itself tells us, and as we will see when we move on to Revelation chapters 4 and 5, the book holds out hope for the Laodiceans of the world. John’s agenda is to heal more than to condemn.

Let’s look at the cutting imagery in the message. Laodicea was known for its wealth, its production of textiles, and its medical treatments, including especially eye treatments. So, the message emphasizes to the church its poverty, its nakedness, and its blindness. But why make these pointed criticisms? Not mainly to score rhetorical points. Not mainly to condemn.

The message does challenge the Laodicean self-sufficiency, naming it in terms of false confidence in wealth, in textile production, in medical care. But John wants to make clear the Lamb’s offer—Jesus makes available for “purchase” “gold refined by fire” that will give the Laodiceans authentic wealth. He makes available “white robes” that will genuinely clothe those who put them on. He makes available “salve to anoint your eyes” that will provide genuine sight.

The next vision of the book, in chapters four and five, follows directly from this message to the Laodiceans. The danger for all the congregations is becoming indistinguishable from their surrounding culture. In the United States, the danger has been that Christianity becomes inextricably identified with the American empire. Then it seems that the only way to oppose the empire is to reject Christian faith. What a terrible tragedy. Not least because so many American Christians witneaffirmconquering by coercion rather than conquering by love and compassion. Not least because in rejecting Christianity, many people of good will fail to learn from the message of Revelation about the genuine power that shapes the universe.

But the seven messages end with a call to open the door to a different notion of power and hope and security and wealth. We can embrace these metaphors from the message to Laodicea: Use the eye-salve that provides genuine sight that will allow you to recognize that empire equals death and that to resist empire leads to life. And open the door to the one who embodies this life—as we will see in the next vision, the one whose self-sacrifice and nonviolent resistance leads to resurrection and celebration.

So, this, then, is where we are so far in the story that Revelation tells. The first vision, chapters one, two, and three, warns of accepting the worldview of empire and twisting Christian faith to fit with that worldview. Such acceptance leads to death. But with the warning comes witness to faithfulness that is possible. With the warning comes witness to genuine wealth that is available to those who resist the Empire story and embrace a different kind of story. The story of the Lamb. Our next vision will go deeper into genuine power and show the one on the throne and the faithful Lamb, already worshiped as the bringer of healing and the giver of life. Then will we turn to the other, more notorious visions, that deconstruct empire as a way of life. But the affirmation of hope and blessing precede the visions of chaos.

The message of weakness in power ultimately is secondary to the message of power in weakness. Amen.

Here is a link to all the sermons in this series.

Is there such a thing as “Anabaptist theology” for the present day? Is seeking to construct a distinctively Anabaptist theology an appropriate task for the 21^st century?

John Howard Yoder did not consider himself a systematic theologian, and as far as I know would not have called himself a constructive theologian. However, his work certainly directly related to the task many Mennonites, and others who would also think of themselves as spiritual descendants of the 16^th century Anabaptists see as vital for the viability of Mennonite and other Anabaptist communities—namely, self-conscious work at articulating their theological convictions in ways that might provide sustenance to their tradition.

Yoder’s model I will call “practice-oriented” theology. To help understand Yoder’s approach, and why it’s an exemplary model for those of us engagement in the work of constructive Anabaptist theology for the 21^st century, I will first look at a quite different model for contemporary Anabaptist theology and reflect on the differences between these two models.

Tom Finger, like many other Mennonite writers wrestling with the challenge of working within the Anabaptist tradition (notably a marginal perspective in the history of Christian theology), seeks to find links of commonality with more mainstream traditions. In doing so, he takes an approach I will call “doctrine-oriented” theology.

Finger’s work has many characteristics unique to his own perspective, certainly, yet in relation to the key points I will focus on, his approach is at least somewhat representative of the general approach taken by Anabaptist-Mennonite theologians seeking rapprochement with mainstream theologies.

I understand the central characteristics of “Anabaptist theology” to be centered in an integration of theological convictions with ethical practices.  The ethical commitments of the sixteenth century Anabaptists such as their pacifism, their emphasis on economic sharing, and their rejection of the subordination of the church to nation-states, reflected a distinctive theology that placed central importance on commitment to the way of Jesus in costly discipleship.

Finger helps us a great deal in understanding the central characteristics of Anabaptist theology.  However, I will suggest that in his decision to frame his theological proposal within the general approach of mainstream Christian theology (which has not, as a rule, placed ethical faithfulness to the way of Jesus at the center of theological reflection), he risks minimizing the theological convictions that may be the most important contribution Anabaptists have to make the Christian existence in twenty-first century North America.

Finger joins with others who have sought to construct Anabaptist theology in ways that stress commonalities with mainstream Christian theology and place major importance on drawing on the post-biblical (and, maybe even more so, the post-fourth century) dogmatic theological tradition and on centering more on the internal rituals of Christian communities.  These emphases may threaten to diminish Anabaptist distinctions and the potential of theology in the Anabaptist tradition to recover the core ethos of the biblical portrayal of the life of faith.

Finger’s most thorough treatment of these themes, A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology: Biblical, Historical, Constructive,[1] examines Anabaptist theology in great detail, both in the 16^th century and in our contemporary North American setting. Finger read thoroughly in 16^th-century Anabaptist sources, and probably no one has read as widely in 20^th- and 21^st-century Anabaptist/Mennonite theology.

The book begins with a brief summary of key aspects of the 16^th-century Anabaptist movement based on up-to-date scholarship, followed by a summary of currents in recent historiography.  Next comes a groundbreaking description of what Finger calls “Contemporary Approaches to Theology in Anabaptist Perspective.”

In considering “approaches to theology,” Finger’s “contemporary Anabaptist” category is pretty much synonymous with “Mennonite,” though he does include Baptist theologian James McClendon and Nancey Murphy from the Church of the Brethren.

In sketching the present scene, Finger’s concerns are theological.  He states, “since I am mainly concerned with comprehensive theologizing, I will chiefly consider authors who have completed at least one work of this kind or who often addressed this task otherwise.”[2]  As becomes clear in the course of the book, what Finger has in mind with “contemporary theologizing” is a pretty traditional view of “theology.”  He focuses on formal doctrines, understandings of personal salvation, and church rituals.  He defines theology on page 95: “The discovery, understanding, and transformation of the basic convictions of religious communities, and relating these convictions coherently to each other and to whatever else exists.”

The heart of the book contains in-depth discussions of six themes that presumably constitute what Finger sees as Christianity’s core convictions.  These are: (1) the personal dimension (personal salvation and justification theology), (2) the communal dimension (the community of faith especially focused on baptism, the Lord’s Supper, church discipline, and economic sharing), (3) the missional dimension (evangelism and responses to the world), (4) Jesus and divine reality (doctrines of the person and work of Jesus Christ and the Trinity), (5) human nature (theological anthropology), and (6) the last things (eschatology).

Finger follows the same outline for each theme.  He begins by summarizing 16^th-century Anabaptist views, then he describes and critiques contemporary Anabaptist discussions of his themes.  He concludes each chapter by articulating his own constructive proposal. Though Finger’s concern is with theology (as defined above), he seeks to view theology in an ethically oriented way.  He understands one of the central elements of Anabaptist theologizing to be a concern with integrating belief and practice, not simply focusing on disembodied ideas.  Finger expresses this concern by suggesting at that since Anabaptist theology emerged among people on the margins of their societies, it might have special relevance today for reflecting theologically about present-day situations of marginalization.

Finger provides access to 16^th-century materials rarely presented in an overtly theological context – reflecting an up-to-date awareness of historical scholarship and, most importantly, an eye to the present-day theological relevance of these materials.  Side-by-side with this effort of historical retrieval, Finger gives us a fascinating portrayal of theological ferment among current Anabaptist theologians.  He helps us to see the wide diversity in our dynamic community of scholars.  Finger also helps us to see how those within this diverse community of thinkers are nonetheless united in their deep concerns for peace and for the integration of belief and practice.

Though Finger is obviously concerned with ethics, and with how theology translates into practice, as a rule this concern is evinced mostly in statements that he has this concern more than in the clear content of the theological analysis.  That is, Finger in practice still seems to treat theology more as ideas and disembodied beliefs than as always-embodied convictions that reflect political and socio-cultural interests and cannot truly be understood apart from those interests.  For Finger, ethics seems more like an add-on to pure theology than something that is inextricably a part of all theological reflection.

Finger is by far the strongest on description.  He carefully and cautiously describes, then proposes.  This descriptive element of his work greatly overshadows the sharper prophetic critique and ethical exhortation that seems to have been at the center of 16^th-century Anabaptist faith.  The irenic tone of A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology will insure that it will not alienate and drive away readers from other traditions.

At the same time, this means that Finger does not share the conflictual dynamics characteristic of his Anabaptist forebears that followed from their directly challenging status quo religion.  Given that probably the most universal characteristic shared across the diversities of 16^th century Anabaptism was how their convictions and practices got them into serious trouble, one wonders whether there might be somewhat of a tension with latter-day theologies that want to call themselves Anabaptist and yet end up being quite safe and comfortable.

Seeking to be irenic, while laudatory in many respects, may also run the risk of muting key Anabaptist distinctives. An overly irenic approach may lead to allowing the mainstream traditions to set the agenda in a way that privileges their (non-pacifist!) concerns and leaves crucial Anabaptist concerns (especially related to Anabaptist pacifist convictions) unmentioned or relegated to footnotes or appendices to the discussion that “truly matters.”

What Should Contemporary Anabaptist Theology be Like?

More than ever before, North American Anabaptists are challenged to become self-conscious about articulating our theological convictions.  This tradition has been sustained for many generations more by the strength of family and cultural ties than by clearly, overtly stated common convictions.  However, in North America’s ever-more transient culture, into which Anabaptists are increasingly being acculturated, those old ties are weakening.  The future viability of the Anabaptist tradition cannot be taken for granted. Consequently, the importance within the tradition of self-conscious constructive theology has grown significantly.

I read Finger as making an important contribution in uncovering and helping to make more coherent important theological resources from the 16^th century and familiarizing his readers with contemporary options.  Certainly his constructive proposals are well-considered, and useful for contemporary Anabaptists (and all other Christians for that matter).

However, my take on what questions contemporary Anabaptists ought to be asking is different.  I am not convinced that theologizing as Finger has done, focusing mostly on doctrinal formulations, the internal debates of theological discourse, and the sacramental practices within the church – theologizing that will likely not get him into trouble with anyone – is the best reflection of the spirit of 16^th-century Anabaptist theology or the best kind of contribution pacifist Christians might make to theology seeking to engage our present historical context.

As Finger shows us, we in the Anabaptist tradition need continually to be reflecting on what our theology is and should be.  For one reason, as pacifist Christians, we have a call to witness to Jesus’ way in the face of whatever forces in our present world are hurting, violating, oppressing, and dominating the human beings God loves.

I support Finger’s use of “Anabaptist” as a rubric for the kind of theology we need to be producing.  This rubric both anchors us in a particular tradition, the spiritual descendants of the Radical Reformers, and allows us to be open in engaging the entire Christian tradition and to seek to be relevant in the catholic Christian community.[3] I mean here to affirm Yoder’s sentiment at the beginning of his book, The Priestly Kingdom: “The vision of discipleship projected in this collection is founded in Scripture and catholic tradition, and is pertinent today as a call for all Christian believers.” However, in many ways Yoder’s approach contrasts sharply with Finger’s.

Like Finger has been, Yoder was an ecumenist, deeply concerned with respectful interaction with other Christians, and a regular official Mennonite representative in various ecumenical settings around the world. However, whereas Finger focuses a great deal of energy in finding common ground with the mainstream tradition, Yoder emphasized the need to focus on the differences—in part as a way to keep the core convictions of the minority group from being absorbed by an emphasis on the similarities.

I affirm Yoder’s approach. One important ramification for Anabaptists is their responsibility assertively to articulate their core convictions that may well be at variance with mainstream assumptions. Early in his academic career, Yoder made this point in his theological analysis of the dialogues of the earliest Swiss Anabaptists with their Reformed adversaries. He argued that those Anabaptists modeled “a truly fraternal polemic” that remains worth emulating. “Both the past and the present will be better served if the oppositions are revealed and not silenced in the interests of an alleged ecumenicity. The tragic part of the Reformation history, and especially the relationships of the Reformation to the Anabaptists, is not that there were differing opinions at that time, but rather that they did not find the Christian way to deal with their differences of opinion; that is, that their differences were not resolved theologically, but rather by police action.”[4]

One way to understand Yoder’s subsequent work is to see it as an effort to embody what he understood to be the heart of the Anabaptist way of theologizing—a quest for ecumenical dialogue that combines respect and genuine listening with honest voicing of differences and seeking to hold all theology accountable to the message of Jesus.

He returned to this theme of ecumenical conversation in the final essay he wrote before his death in December 1997: “The foundational mandate to be reconciled, the one that matters, is the one that applies where we differ. That we can work together when we agree is not yet the gospel. That is the sociological works-religion, something we can do for ourselves, in our own strength. The word of reconciliation, on the other hand, directs us to talk together when we disagree. The gospel is that despite ourselves, by grace, we have been made one with people with whom we were not one.”[5]

In between these two writings, in his most famous book, The Politics of Jesus, Yoder emphasized that one of the New Testament’s main teachings was the call to reconciliation among formerly alienated Jews and Gentiles, called together to witness to the world of God’s healing power that breaks down walls of enmity that divide disparate people. The point here, too, is not a muting of differences but unity amidst the differences.

The lesson is not that we should place our highest priority on commonality in a way that mutes differences (and inevitably silences minorities and blocks the conversation group as a whole from the minorities’ insights). Rather, according to Yoder, the New Testament doctrine of justification emphasizes the social nature of salvation—and the community that justified people form is a place for conversation, mutual learning, and communal discernment that is only possible when differences are aired and various points of view are allowed to find expression.

Anabaptists should learn most of all from the distinctive elements of their tradition and not be defensive or apologetic about those in conversations with other Christians. Their theology should be first of all Anabaptist theology, then they build on the common ground they find with others—rather than letting the agendas of other traditions mute our own central convictions as Anabaptists.

What are the key Anabaptist convictions? Contemporary Anabaptist theology should read Anabaptist history (16^th century and the years since) similarly to how we read the Bible.  We today are part of the same, on-going story as the biblical people, especially Jesus, and as the Anabaptists of the 16^th century and since.  We do not critically distance ourselves from the story, but we also recognize that we need to read the story truthfully, to allow it to challenge us and not simply say what we want it to say.

We consider the entire story, trying to listen to it on its own terms.  However, we use a reading strategy that privileges themes in the broader story that (1) accurately support Jesus’ own summary of the Law and Prophets (that is, his Commandment to love God and neighbor) and that (2) most helpfully support our calling today to apply Jesus’ Commandment to our context.

Reading the Bible and the Anabaptist stories in the light of Jesus’ life and teaching underscores that both stories at their cores integrate belief and practice.  The stuff of biblical theology and the stuff of Anabaptist theology are made up primarily of real life, concrete moral practices, the effort to live faithfully.  This kind of theology does not place abstract doctrines or what other theologians have said about theology at the center – either in theory or in practice.

The 16^th-century Anabaptists wrote little formal theology.  Most early leaders had little formal education and the few more highly educated ones ended up dying early (e.g., the one leader with a doctorate in theology, Balthasar Hubmaier, was executed by the Viennese government in 1528, three years after the movement began).  Few of their spiritual descendants have written formal theology either; until recently this relative silence has led to debates about how much we should assume they share with the mainstream of orthodox Christian theology.

Do their mostly positive allusions to commonly held Christian doctrines (trinitarianism, creedal formulations, et al) imply that they are best seen as theologically orthodox Christians who added on some distinctive ethical practices such as pacifism?  Or does their basic lack of interest in formal dogmatic theology imply an alternative orientation to Christian faith that privileges right practice over right belief in ways that actually, if spelled out, would lead to an entirely different type of theology, root and branch?

I lean towards the latter inclination in relation to Anabaptist theology.[6]  I believe that theology done after the Anabaptists (meaning, following their path even while going beyond what they directly said) should be a distinctive kind of theology.  Anabaptists have resisted the systematizing and formalizing of theology into doctrinal formulations and insider language games.  Their approach to faith has been more concrete and practical.

If we in North American Anabaptist communities are in a new era, where the times require more self-consciously articulating our theological convictions (since we may no longer so easily depend upon family and cultural ties to sustain our tradition), is our best strategy to link more closely with traditions with a longer history of formal theology, simply adding our ethical distinctives to the already-formulated “classical” theologies?  Or is the best strategy to think through the entire theological enterprise anew in light of core Anabaptist convictions?

This latter approach, which I endorse, would, for example, emphasize that a pacifist doctrine of God might be different than doctrines of God[7] formulated by theologians in, say, Augustinian, Thomistic, Lutheran, or Calvinist traditions that have explicitly approved of Christians fighting wars.[8]

To be clear on this point we could call ours “radical pacifist Anabaptist theology.”  Since such a term, in my mind, would actually be redundant, I will not seriously propose to use it.  But in saying that “Anabaptist theology” should be seen as, by definition, meaning “radically pacifist Anabaptist theology” I assert that the core of “Anabaptist theology” is pacifism.

Of course, our definition of “pacifism” will determine what this core has to do with. By pacifism, I mean the conviction that no values or commitments are as important as the value and commitment to love God and neighbor. Anabaptist theology bases this conviction on Jesus’ life and teaching. Hence, the core of “Anabaptist theology” as pacifist theology is the message of Jesus. Yoder has made this profoundly clear in the basic argument of The Politics of Jesus: That the Jesus of the New Testament (and the Jesus of history) at the heart of his message emphasized love and servanthood in imitation of Israel’s God, and that this Jesus, appropriately confessed by Christians as Son of God, provides the norm for all subsequent Christian belief and practice.

Theology drawing on the Anabaptist stream of Christianity sees the root or foundational theological conviction being Jesus’ love command.  Hence, it is “radical pacifist theology,” “radical” in that sense that at its root pacifism affirms love as the core truth.  By “pacifist” I mean understanding the loving God and each human being as the core conviction that exceeds all others.  For pacifism, no other value, truth, conviction, or commitment can be important enough to take priority over the love command – that is, no value is worth committing violence for.

It is important for Anabaptists today to emphasize (in a way not clearly seen in our tradition until quite recently) that the “peace” Jesus embodied was the “peace” described in the Old Testament with a cluster of socially oriented terms such as shalom (“peace”), mishpat and sedeqah (“justice”) and chesed (“mercy”).  This is a broad, positive, active, life-affirming, world-transforming, and injustice-resisting concept.  “Peace” as presented by Jesus includes direct involvement in resisting evil (nonviolently), in seeking to bring healing to the world’s brokenness through fostering genuine social justice.[9]

Reading the Anabaptist convictions that matter most as “radical pacifist convictions” captures the authentic core of tradition as read through the lens of Jesus’ message.  This is not to say that Anabaptists have always embodied this message so much as to say that insofar as they have done so, at that point what matters most about the tradition is at the forefront.

For “Radical pacifist Anabaptist theology” (from now on, simply “Anabaptist theology”), the stuff of theology is the message of love, its embodiment in actual life, its need in our broken world, and theological reflection in light of this message, embodiment, and need.  The doctrines, formal traditions, creeds, technical theological language, only have value for Anabaptist theology insofar as they illumine the message of love; they are not valued as ends in themselves.

Practice-Oriented Theology

Contemporary Anabaptist theology may thus be conceptualized as directly connected to social life and concrete ethics.  It seeks to follow the biblical mode of focusing on people’s actual lives and applying theological convictions directly to practices that sustain a people’s faithfulness to their vocation as agents of God’s shalom.  It sees as its model Jesus’ style of communicating his convictions concerning God and truth – life-oriented, practical, accessible, embodied in life, directly in service of the love command.

This practice-oriented theology sees its central concern as theological reflection on the stuff of actual life.  It may be contrasted with other types of theology that focus their reflection more overtly on doctrines and creeds, past and current theological formulations, and insider rituals as the stuff of theology.  This more doctrine- and ritual-oriented theology primarily refers to theology, its own internal set of concerns.

Yoder addressed philosophical ethics in an essay called “Work and Word: The Alternatives to Methodologism,” but some of his points could also be applied to doctrine-oriented theology. He warns of the dangers of “word-spinners” substituting preoccupations with definitions and deductions drawn from the definitions for the “ordinary language” of actual life. “Language is never self-contained unless it be, like algebra, the product of a mind abstracting from moral community.”[10]

Contemporary Anabaptist theology as practice-oriented theology will tend to be theological reflection that directly applies the biblical story to life in the world such as the problems of violence and poverty, the quest for meaning in a consumerist society that dominates the world economically and militarily, and the future of life in face of environmental degradation.  This focus contrasts with theological reflection that focuses first of all on theological formulations in various forms and only turns to life in the world as a second level concern.

Anabaptist theology will see the life and teaching of Jesus as the most fundamental contribution the Bible makes to present-day theology.  Rather than focusing energy on the formulation of doctrines of scripture’s authority, it will focus on drawing on the story of Jesus for interpretive clues for engaging with the crucial issues of present-day life.

Earl Zimmerman has helped us see how directly Yoder’s recovery of the “politics of Jesus” stemmed from his immersion in post-World War II Europe’s recovery from the devastation of the immense violence that lasted from 1914-1945.[11] Yoder believed that one of the roots of that period of total war may be found in the failure of the European churches to be clear about the message of Jesus. He believed that what was needed was not a witness from the margins from a small sect but a message taken to the mainstream about the actual message of the Jesus all Christians claim as Lord and Savior. However, his take on Jesus surely stemmed from his own Anabaptist convictions. His was an Anabaptist theology—but one aimed to speak to all Christians based on those core Anabaptist convictions that the other traditions had avoided.

These are some of the questions contemporary Anabaptist theology might engage:

•Why does so much theology support violence?  Why are American Christians more likely to support capital punishment and the War in Iraq than non-Christians?  How might we think theologically in ways that overcome this problem? How do we challenge what Walter Wink calls the “myth of redemptive violence” so widespread in American society?

•How does Christian theology respond to its rival, the “faith” of capitalism that currently is transforming our world into a “planet of slums”?

•What are the religious beliefs that underwrite the commodification and accompanying destructive exploitation of our natural environment?

•How do we reflect theologically on the ways many Christians have lifted the alleged sins of gay and lesbian Christians as bases for unprecedented levels of intra-church conflict all out of proportion with the weight these “sins” are given in the Bible?

We may contrast these questions with other types of questions and concerns expressed in doctrine-oriented theology, both from the evangelical side and from the mainstream side.

The kinds of concerns focused on by evangelical theology may be illustrated by issues raised by Roger Olson in the final section, entitled “Issues in Evangelical Theology,” in his recent handbook on evangelical theology.[12]

•How do we understand the baptism and gifts of the Holy Spirit?  Do we think in terms of a “second blessing” or second definite work of grace that lifts the Christian to a new level of faith-experience or more in terms of one completed baptism of the Spirit at the point of conversion?

•What beliefs are acceptable for one who wants to be identified as an “evangelical Christian”?  What are the boundary lines to acceptable belief?

•How does one know the truth status of truth claims about God?  Is true knowledge of God based only on special revelation and faith in God’s Word?  Can the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus Christ be rationally proven?

•Which view about the End Times is most persuasive – premillennialism, amillennialism, or postmillennialism?

•Is the Bible perfect – historically accurate and internally consistent – in every detail or is it more that it is trustworthy in what it teaches concerning salvation while also reflecting human fallibility in some of its historical accounts?

We may illustrate the concerns of mainstream theology by noting a randomly chosen (June 14, 2005) issue of The Christian Century that devoted its cover article to various contemporary views of the doctrine of justification by faith.  The article examines recent writing on this doctrine, focusing on how theological ideas about justification are being debated.  As it turns out, the article concludes with some sharp questions of these writers and their neglect of the social-ethical relevance of justification.  Nonetheless, except for these questions at the end, the article focused on an internal doctrinal theme as an example worth extensive discussion illustrating what is currently seen as important in ecumenical theology.

Another example of the concerns of mainstream theology, concerns tending to be theological ideas more than actual life, may be seen with the table of contents from another randomly chosen issue (April 2005) of Modern Theology, a pre-eminent English-language journal devoted to academic theology.  These are some of the article titles: “On the Meaning and Relevance of Baader’s Theological Critique of Descartes,” “Philosophy and Salvation: The Apophatic in the Thought of Arthur Schopenhauer,” and “The Simplicity of the Living God: Aquinas, Barth, and Some Philosophers.”

My point with these contrasting tendencies is not to critique more doctrinally-oriented theology but simply to suggest that Anabaptist theology is something quite different.

Whither Contemporary Anabaptist Theology?

With this perspective on “practice-oriented” theology in mind, I want to return to the contrast between Finger and Yoder’s respective approaches to Anabaptist theology. I do believe Tom Finger has made a major contribution to the task of Anabaptist theology today.  Yet I remain convinced contemporary Anabaptist theology is better pursued somewhat differently.[13]

One question is whether in trying to mediate between Anabaptist and mainstream theologies, Finger tilts too far in the direction of the latter style of theology.  Two others who have also produced major theological works that could be seen as “contemporary Anabaptist theologies” (though neither uses that term for their work), James Reimer and James McClendon, reflect similar tendencies.

Reimer’s massive collection of theological essays, Mennonites and Classical Theology,[14] has the sub-title, “Dogmatic Foundations for Theological Ethics.”  In the introduction, Reimer explains that though often criticized for focusing too much on “dogmatics,” he does indeed take ethics (which he defines as “the principles guiding human behavior”) seriously.  But he is convinced that “ethics, particularly Christian ethics (including the Mennonite concern for peace, justice, and nonviolent love) needs a ground outside itself” – what he calls a “foundation.”[15]

Consequently, “there are few essays in this volume which deal specifically with ethical topics.”[16]  Indeed, beyond on occasion mentioning that he is concerned with ethics, Reimer’s theological reflection rarely touches down in concrete reality – focusing almost exclusively on thinkers, thoughts, and traditions.

In doing theology that serves as a “foundation” for ethics while rarely directly touching on real life ethics – and, for that matter, in understanding “ethics” primarily as “principles” rather than concrete, embodied practices – Reimer situates himself much closer to the doctrine-oriented than to practice-oriented theology.

McClendon completed his three volume systematic theology in 2000.  Most of his life a Southern Baptist (he joined a Church of the Brethren congregation late in life), McClendon coined the term (lower-case “b”) “baptist” to describe his theology.  However, he did write that, under the influence of John Howard Yoder, he became, “though I still have no love for the term itself – an ‘Anabaptist’ Baptist.”[17]  McClendon wrote his trilogy in an attempt to provide an alternative to the mainstream Christian traditions.  Rather than starting with the “foundations,” he started with “ethics.”  Then came his “doctrine” followed only at that point by the more foundational third volume.  And even that volume turned out to be “witness.”

So McClendon sought to give us what could certainly be termed “a contemporary Anabaptist theology.” However, his volumes are notable for their detailed focus on other theological work more than on life itself; this is especially the case with volume two, Doctrine. McClendon himself tells us why he took this approach.  “I was determined to write every sentence in light of my new-gained radical convictions, and yet to write in such a way that standard-account people, those who shared my pre-Yoder standpoint, could make sense of it.”[18] Admirable as McClendon’s strategy may be, what he produced is more accurately described as doctrine-oriented theology seeking to address the problems of theology in that mode than as actual practice-oriented theology.

Finger follows a similar strategy – working within the mode of doctrine-oriented theology but with the intent of moving it more toward practice-oriented theology, bringing core Anabaptist convictions (e.g., peace, close attention to Jesus’ life and teaching, an integration of belief and practice) to bear on the theological enterprise in a way that “makes sense to standard-account people.”  Like with McClendon, I perceive that Finger also would hope to persuade the “standard account people” to regard Anabaptist convictions more positively.

However, is theology done in the doctrine-oriented mode, even with overt delineation of Anabaptist convictions, the best approach for contemporary Anabaptists?  This mode may relativize these convictions so much that what we end up with is not truly “radically pacifist.”

The construction of contemporary Anabaptist theology remains an always-open task.  The ideal I point toward combines serious engagement with the biblical story with careful analysis of contemporary social issues.  It remains a point of debate whether Anabaptist theology may take the form of systematic theology and remain consistently Anabaptist.  If such an articulation is possible, it must retain at its core a privileging of the biblical story understood as centered in Jesus’ life and teaching over later creedal formulations and internally-oriented rituals.  That is, an Anabaptist systematic theology must remain “radical pacifist” theology.[19]

In the past half-century’s emergent theological scholarship among Anabaptists, John Howard Yoder has approached my ideal.[20] Yoder’s most overtly doctrinal book, Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method[21] aptly illustrates his practice-oriented approach even to what we could call doctrinal theology. He takes the life and teaching of Jesus as his foundation. Only after that starting point does he then trace the development of Christological doctrines. Yoder does deal seriously with the later creeds and confessions, by and large affirming their truthfulness. However, they remain supplementary to the practical, concrete, ethically-engaged life of the person Jesus of Nazareth.

This book, titled as it is, Preface to Theology, could also be seen as a preface to Yoder’s 1972 book, The Politics of Jesus. Read in light of Preface, Politics may be seen as a further development of Yoder’s account of his doctrine of Christ. This doctrine is inextricably linked with ethics. Because of Jesus’ life, he is affirmed as God Incarnate—and this life remains the concrete model for all Christians and the measuring rod for all subsequent doctrine.

Doctrine-oriented theology, which starts with the creeds and confessions (“definitions and deductions from the definitions”) simply does not approach the dogmas as supplementary to the story of Jesus told in the New Testament. We see the problem from the earliest widely-used creed, the Apostle’s Creed (probably first formulated in the late 2^nd century). This creed, which served as the model for many later statements and remains central in creedal churches around the world, simply bypasses Jesus’ life and teaching altogether, jumping from “born of the Virgin Mary” to “suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

Conclusion

I propose that if we understand embodying and applying Jesus’ love command (what I call “pacifism”) as our core Anabaptist conviction, then Anabaptist theology should self-consciously focus on practical social ethics as an intrinsic part of all our theologizing rather than seeing it as a second-level concern after working on “pure theology.”  That is, our theology from the start and throughout should be practice-oriented more than doctrine-oriented.

Pacifist theology, which by definition is concerned at its core with the embodiment of Jesus’ love command, will always be practice-oriented.  Since Anabaptist theology understands itself as, above all else, based on the message of Jesus, it should always be pacifist theology.  Such a theology will find itself at odds with non-pacifist theology in relation to its articulation of the core convictions of Christian faith.

Rather than trying to fit within the Western (non-pacifist!) theological tradition, accepting this tradition’s basic theological articulations but adding on an ethical, even nonviolent, component, contemporary Anabaptist theology has the calling to rethink theology root and branch in light of its most fundamental conviction – that no other value or commitment takes precedent over the love command.

[See the notes on Revelation 1]

The first thing to notice when we begin to look at the messages to the seven churches of Asia that make up chapters two and three is that they are part of the same vision that began in 1:9 when John hears a “loud voice” telling him to write this book that records what he will see and “send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea” (1:9-11).

John turns “to see whose voice it was that spoke to me” (1:12), at which point the first vision of the book begins. John learns that the voice speaking to him is Jesus. In the immediate vision, John sees many images that put together form a kind of Christology. Many of these images are then incorporated in the seven messages to come. As we move on to chapter two, we should not be misled by the chapter break in our English translation. The original did not have such breaks, and it would have been clear to the first listeners/readers that this one vision of Jesus that begins the series that John will report on throughout the book includes both the word-picture of Jesus presented in 1:12-20 and the messages this same Jesus gives to the seven churches in chapters two and three.

These messages, thus, tells us several crucial things for understanding the book as a whole, including not least a fleshing out of the picture of Jesus—the one who John announces with the first words of the book is the subject of the one “revelation” the book gives. These messages are not of interest only for what they tell us about the seven churches and their environments but also for what they tell us about the giver of the messages. They also, clearly, by their place in the larger narrative of the book, set the agenda for the book as a whole. If we want to understand the later visions, we must always return to these seven messages that provide the context for the visions that follow.

John leads into the seven messages with his comment in 1:20 about how seven stars the visionary Jesus holds in his right hand (1:16) are “the angels of the seven churches.” As we read the messages, we will see that with each one, Jesus speaks to “the angel of the church” who in some sense mediates the message to the church. Following Walter Wink’s discussion in Engaging the Powers, I understand the reference to the “angels of the churches” to be a way of talking about each church’s inner, spiritual reality. Jesus will speak to each church’s essence. The congregations each have an existence of their own as a collective of their members. This existence reflects not only the group personality but also the social context of the congregations in how each in some sense is deeply shaped by the social environment of which they are part. When Jesus speaks to the “angels,” he speaks directly to the heart and soul of each congregation.

This collection of seven churches is, at the same time, linking the message of Revelation with actual congregations in those seven cities in what is now the western part of Turkey and linking the message of Revelation to the entirety of the first century Christian world (the number “seven” surely is symbolic for the bigger Christian movement). The particular and the universal join together in these messages—and hence in the book of Revelation as a whole.

Revelation 2:1-7—Message to the congregation in Ephesus

The first message goes to the congregation in the largest city in the area, though also the city closest geographically to the island of Patmos that John claims to write from. Ephesus was the fourth largest city in the entire Roman Empire at this time (after Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch). It was also an early center of Christianity, featured prominently in the Book of Acts and, according to Acts, the Apostle Paul’s home for several years.

As with the other messages, the opening words of the message to Ephesus bring in a pertinent piece of chapter one’s vision of Jesus. Here we are told that Jesus “holds the seven stars in his right hand [and] walks among the seven golden lampstands” (2:1, an allusion to 1:16). We have just been told that these lampstands are the seven churches themselves (1:20). So the Ephesian message starts with a strong affirmation of Jesus’ presence among these congregations—a presence surely that would be reassuring but also a challenge to sustain faithfulness to his way.

John’s Jesus praises this congregation for not “tolerating evildoers” (2:2) and for “hating the works of the Nicolaitans” (2:6). The congregation has refused to countenance “those who claim to be apostles but are not” (2:2). It also has been working hard and exercising “patient endurance.” This notion of “patient endurance” is mentioned numerous times in Revelation as a central calling for followers of the Lamb (in imitation of him). The seven messages as a whole make it clear that one of the central challenges for John’s audience is to sustain their commitment to Jesus’ path of nonviolent resistance to the empire’s hegemony. How might this commitment be sustained? Through “patient endurance,” recognizing that saying no to the empire will likely result in hardship and even conflict. “Follow the Lamb wherever he goes”—i.e., remain clear-eyed about the true bases of Rome’s claims for divine blessing, band together in communities of resistance, “conquer” through self-giving love rather than joining with Rome’s dominating ways.

We may assume, as will be indicated in later messages, that the Nicolaitans and “evildoers” are those who advocate accommodation with Rome—an accommodation, John believes, that will ultimately undermine the heart of the gospel.

John’s Jesus, though, positive as he is about the congregation’s nonviolent resistance to Rome, expresses a sharp concern as well. “You have abandoned the love you had at first” (2:4). This problem is so bad, that Jesus threats to “remove your lampstand from its place” unless it is resolved. Given that the “lampstand” is actually the church itself, it would appear that the very existence of this congregation is at stake.

Unfortunately for our purposes, what exactly this “abandoned the love you had at first” refers to remains unclear. It is tempting (and attractive) to think of the reference here to be to inter-human love, with the implication that as the Ephesians focused on resistance to Rome they lost the dynamics of compassion, mutual affection, and a welcoming spirit. But the allusion could just as well have in mind a loss of passion and freshness in their commitment to the vision of restorative justice and wide-ranging shalom that they received when they first embraced Jesus and his way. So, we don’t actually receive a lot of clear guidance from this message concerning what problems to avoid. The book does not develop the motif of “love” in a direct way later on.

Maybe at most we can say that, given the centrality of Jesus the Lamb to the message of Revelation and given the centrality in Jesus’ life and teachings of wholehearted and passionate love of God and neighbor, the call to love fellow congregants (and everyone else) and to passionate commitment to Jesus’ way should be assumed. And that the stern warning to the Ephesians stands as a reminder of this assumption—related both to love for other people and love for the path Jesus calls us to follow.

As with the other messages, the message to Ephesus concludes with a call to “conquer.” This call points to one of the central motifs in the book. Reality is portrayed in Revelation as highly conflictual, a struggle within which one must seek victory. But the nature of the victory depends upon the means one uses to engage the struggle. For those aligned with the Empire, the means are violence and domination. For those aligned with the Lamb, the means are “patient endurance” (i.e., “nonviolent resistance”). When John’s Jesus makes promises to “everyone who conquers,” he promises that as with Jesus, “faithful witness” leads to vindication.

Each message has a distinctive promise for the conquerors that points ahead to the later visions of Revelation. Here, the promise is “permission to eat from the tree of life that is in the paradise of God,” an allusion to the vision of the New Jerusalem where the “tree of life” produces abundant fruit (22:2). Note, too, that this same tree also produces leaves that are for “the healing of the nations.” This reminds us that even though Revelation sets up a sharp contrast between the Lamb’s realm and the Beast’s realm, in the end the hope is for those human beings (and their cultures) that are aligned with the Beast to find healing—reinforcing the call to sustain love.

Revelation 2:8-11—Message to the congregation in Smyrna

The city of Smyrna, an important seaport, was about 40 miles from Ephesus. It was notable for constructing the first temple devoted to the goddess Roma about 300 years prior to the time of Revelation. By the end of the first century CE, Smyrna stood as a major center of the practice of emperor worship. So, as in probably each of these seven cities, the practice of worship of the biblical God bumped directly against its main competitor, worship of the Roman emperor (i.e., worship of the Empire itself).

The initial descriptor of Jesus here speaks directly to Smyrnans’ situation. “The first and last, who was dead and came to life” (2:8, alluding to 1:18) reminds readers again of the pattern of Jesus: faithful witness, crucifixion, resurrection, ruler of the kings of the earth (1:5). To link together “Smyrna” and “death” is to speak to the basic challenge facing Jesus followers. What is at stake is whether one will witness to the path of self-giving love even when it requires witnessing against the violence and oppressions of the “great” empire.

Clearly from this message, the Smyrnans understand what is at stake and have made their choice to follow the Lamb’s path—even when, in the context of the city of Smyrna’s all out embrace of the Empire’s way—it means “affliction and poverty” (2:9). What may be the most significant contribution of this message to the overall picture of the seven messages is what is not said within it. Smyrna (as will also be the case in the message to the similar congregation in Philadelphia) receives no criticism whatsoever. In some sense, this congregation serves as a model for what John’s Jesus has in mind for all congregations.

We are not given much information about the Smyrnans’ faithfulness—presumably the heart of it was a recognition that the allures of cooperating with emperor worship must be resisted. Their material poverty (which is also perhaps itself also a reflection of faithful choices to disdain the quest for comfort and material gain through involvement in the work of merchants that draws John’s condemnation in Revelation 18) does not mask their genuine wealth (in the present!) in things that matter most.

The Smyrnans’ face the possibility of imprisonment at the hands of “the devil”—perhaps even the possibility of death. Should they “conquer,” though, remaining on the path of nonviolent resistance, they will receive “the crown of life” (2:10) and “will not be harmed by the second death” (2:11). The “second death” motif points toward the vision of the final judgment (20:11-15) where those who have lived faithfully and whose names are in “the book of life” avoid the “lake of fire” and enter the New Jerusalem.

This message crystallizes the emphasis of the book as a whole. The fear of “poverty and affliction” seems to drive the kind of accommodation with the Empire that John sees as idolatrous—echoing the terrible problems the ancient Hebrews had with foreign gods that pushed them away from faithfulness to Torah and its concomitant practice of shalom for all in their community. The idolatry invariably led to injustice and violence (see Amos, Hosea, and Micah). In exposing the terribly violent underbelly of the Roman Empire that belied its claims to be the bringers of peace (the Pax Romana), John hopes to challenge his audience to break free from the cycle of idolatry leading to injustice and death (see also Romans 1 for Paul’s parallel concern). John’s Jesus wants to drive home to the Smyrnans that their choice to turn from such idolatry puts them on the path of life. They are rich now and are promised the crown of life.

We might easily misunderstand who the Smyrnans’ opponents are here. If we remember that Smyrna was a center for emperor worship, and if we keep in mind that later in Revelation, the Empire is directly linked with Satan, and if we also understand that Judaism and Christianity did not at this point exist as separate religions (in fact, John surely understood himself to be a Jew), then the reference to those who “say that they are Jews and are not but are a synagogue of Satan” will make more sense.

The very next message, to the congregation at Pergamum, refers to the recipients living “where Satan’s throne is” (2:13). Pergamum was also a center for emperor worship, being the home of a temple to Caesar and an enormous altar to Zeus (the ancient Greek high god who by now had been incorporated into the Roman Empire religion).

So, most likely, we should understand “synagogue of Satan” in terms of “Satan’s throne.” John’s Jesus, then, is referring to conflicts between the Lamb’s followers in Smyrna, who rejected any accommodation with Empire religion, with others who claimed to be Christians but who were accommodating with Empire religion. True “Jews,” in John’s mind, reject accommodation—and those who do accommodate simply are not “Jews” (i.e., worshipers of the true God of the Bible). John is not rejecting Judaism or linking it with Satan. His enemies were not members of the Jewish religion in contradistinction with those who were members of the Christian religion. Rather, his enemies are those who see biblical faith as compatible with “going alone” with Empire religion.

By presenting this congregation as one that receives not a single criticism, John wants to challenge his entire audience to seek to imitate their model. He seeks to subvert the conventional wisdom that linked faithfulness with material prosperity and embraced the possibility of cultural accommodation as the necessary path to such prosperity.

Revelation 2:12-17—Message to the congregation in Pergamum

Pergamum was also an important city with, as mentioned above, strong support for Empire religion. This put the congregation there is a difficult situation. What was called for, in face of the powerful attraction of accommodation, was discernment. Hence, the message begins with the image the two-edged sword being held by Jesus, drawing from the beginning vision of Jesus (2:12, alluding to 1:16). The “two-edged sword” connotes discernment, being able to differentiate between truth and falsehood. The vision from chapter one (picked up again in chapter 19) emphasizes that this sword comes out of Jesus’ mouth. So the sword is not a literal weapon of blood-letting (again a key contrast with the Empire—the Empire’s swords to draw blood and visit violence and death; the Lamb’s sword is his word, his nonviolent message of self-giving love).

John’s Jesus commends the Pergamum believers for their perseverance (“you are holding fast to my name”) even in the face of suffering (the one named martyr in the book, Antipas, was killed by the Empire in Pergamum [2:13]). He repeats twice in this one verse that Pergamum is where “Satan” is present—clearly an allusion to the centrality of Empire religion in this community.

The congregation, though, struggles to remain true. People within it accept teachings that weaken their resolve to resist the Empire. These teachings are called “the teaching of Balaam” and the “teaching of the Nicolaitans.” Likely these teachings were essentially the same (interestingly, the name Baalam [Hebrew, from Numbers 22–24] and the name Nicholas [Greek] mean essentially the same thing—literally “conquer the people”). The content is not spelled out, but the idea seems to be that they were teaching that there was nothing wrong with people from the congregation entering fully into the religious life of Pergamum.

As a rule, the Empire religion did not require exclusivity from its adherents. Problems arose not when people worshiped with the general public in the Roman services but also engaged in their own distinct religious practices. This pluralism was tolerated. What caused trouble was when people refused to join in the Roman services in the name of some other faith. This is the kind of trouble John believed his fellow followers of Jesus should be getting into. But they would suffer. Their economic opportunities would be limited. They might even face harsh persecution. His rivals argued that such trouble was unnecessary. We can still worship in our congregation; Rome does not mind that so long as we also join in its services. John’s Jesus calls such an accommodation (spiritual) “fornication” (2:14).

John’s insistence on exclusivity stemmed from his belief that a believer cannot actually pull of the giving of allegiance to two masters. Inevitably, they will have to choose. The worship of the biblical God requires standing against injustice. And Rome was profoundly unjust. If you accommodate to Rome, your private worship in the Christian congregation actually becomes blasphemous. You are worshiping God while also accepting the injustices of the Empire. This parallels the situation in the time of Amos—“go to Bethel and sin” was Amos’s condemnation of those Israelites who attended services claiming to worship God while at the same time exploiting their vulnerable neighbors. Hence, the worship was not an offering to God but a rejection of God.

John’s Jesus calls upon the congregants in Pergamum to repudiate Balaam and the Nicolaitans—or else face “war.” Note that this “war” will be fought with the sword that comes from Jesus’ mouth. It will not be a bloody battle but a “battle” fought based on the proclamation of the word of God in Jesus’ life and teaching.

The reward for the conquerors here is nourishment from “some of the hidden manna” (likely a metaphor for joining in God’s messianic banquet welcoming the partiers into the realm of the New Jerusalem, see 19:1-10) and the gift of a white stone upon which is written the recipient’s name (see 19:12 for a similar reference in relation to Jesus; the stone seems to be a kind of “ticket” that allows its bearer to enter into the New Jerusalem).

Revelation 2:18-29—Message to the congregation in Thyatira

The fourth message goes to the congregation in Thyatira, a city especially noted for its industry and commerce. The images of Jesus that are repeated here refer to his “eyes like a flame of fire” and his feet “like burnished bronze” (2:18, alluding to 1:14-15). These seem to be allusions to his power and his awe-inspiring presence. As with the earlier messages (and the ones to follow), the general sense is that this figure has authority and is present—both in comfort and in confrontation. Whichever, he must be taken seriously.

The Thyatiran congregation’s strengths echo those of Ephesus (“faith, service, and patient endurance,” 2:19) with the added affirmation of their “love” and, crucially, that their “last works are greater than the first.” So, unlike Ephesus, they are not losing their “first love” but still growing in it.

However, unlike the Ephesians, who do not tolerate the accommodationist Nicolaitans (2:6), the Thyatirans are tolerating accommodationist theology and ethics. The symbol here is their acceptance of “that woman Jezebel” (2:20). Almost certainly, “Jezebel” is not the prophet’s name. Jezebel is a figure of condemnation in the Bible. Married to Israel’s king Ahab, she was a Canaanite who influenced Ahab—and with him, the broader nation—to turn to other gods. John’s Jesus is using this label to evoke the same kind of condemnation of the prophet who was influential among the Thyatirans.

He sees the problems as a contemporary manifestation of what happened in the day of the historical Jezebel: “practicing fornication and eating food sacrificed to idols” (2:21). That is, as with the first Jezebel, now the people in the community of faith are being lured into accommodating with Empire religion—leading to spiritual adultery and acceptance of imperial ethics. In the case of ancient Israel, the paradigmatic expression of Jezebel’s influence was when Ahab framed and then executed an Israelite whose faithfulness to Torah led him to insist on retaining his land as an inheritance for his descendants. Ahab’s big move was to push the nation from a respect for the role of land-as-inheritance in making it possible for all the people in the community to maintain viable lives and toward the acceptance of land-as-possession, triggering devastating disparities in wealth between the haves and the have-nots with concomitant exploitation of the vulnerabilities of the have-nots to further enrich the haves. This was the situation that had evolved that Amos railed against several generations after Ahab.

Given Thyatira’s role as a regional economic center and noting the condemnation of imperial economics later in Revelation (note especially chapter 18), we can assume that the use of the symbol “Jezebel” may well have been meant to include a connotation that here the accommodation has problematic economic ramifications. John’s Jesus echoes Amos in warning of devastating consequences for those who do not repent—i.e., turn back to God’s justice.

Part of Jezebel’s teachings include a focus on “the deep things of Satan.” Many interpreters see here an allusion to special claims for insight in a Gnostic sense—religious truths only available to insiders. Remembering the other allusions to “Satan” in the messages, we might also see here another reminder of the allegation that the Roman Empire is linked inextricably with Satan. The “deep things of Satan” may simply be the claims made by Rome to divine status. They may seem like “deep truths” but are actually only lies of Satan.

For those who resist Jezebel’s teachings (and, hence, resist accommodation to empire), thereby “conquering,” the reward will be sharing in Jesus’ “rule of the kings of the earth” (1:5) to be manifested in the New Jerusalem. The “rule” here can be seen as a kind of shepherding (also a possible translation of poimonei, “rule”) that ultimately leads to the healing of the kings (22:4). The “shattering of the clay pots” may actually be an allusion to the ending of the kings’ resistance to the Lamb’s rule. When this resistance ends, the kings enter the New Jerusalem, whose doors are never shut but who also does not admit anything unclean.

The conqueror will also be given “the morning star” (2:28), which is a title given to Jesus at the very end of the book (22:16). That is, the conqueror will be united with Jesus, a powerful promise in face of possible suffering for one’s nonviolent resistance in the present.

[See the notes on Revelation 3 (coming soon)]

[Index for Revelation Notes]

Presented at Conference on Religion and Peace—James Madison University—April 11, 2005

As a Christian pacifist theologian, I find it more than a little ironic that many Christians in the United States compare Christianity to other religions, especially Islam and Judaism, by asserting that Christianity is more peaceful.  They presumably base such a claim on the teachings of Jesus, who they affirm as central to their faith.  However, looking at the message of Jesus only underscores how much blood we Christians actually have on our hands over the past two millennia, how far most Christians over most of Christianity’s history have moved from our namesake’s words such as “love your enemies,” “turn the other cheek,” and “Father, forgive them” when it comes to issues of war and peace.

This is to say, as I write about a Christian perspective on war and peace I recognize just how tiny of a minority within the Christian tradition I represent.  Most Christians are not pacifists; only a few have ever been, at least in the years since 300 CE.  However, I will suggest that pacifism has strong grounding in the basic storyline of the Christian Bible, that pacifism is in fact the original (or default) position of Christianity, that pacifism has always existed as an option for Christian believers, and that following the 20^th century, the century of total war, Christian pacifism has more relevance (and more adherents) than ever before.[1]

I need to start with some definitions before outlining the biblical grounding for Christian pacifism.  The most common definitions of “pacifism” focus on what pacifism rejects, characterizing pacifism as the in-principled rejection of participation in warfare.  Some pacifists would say that all war is wrong, others more that they simply themselves will never fight.  Focusing on what pacifism affirms, I define pacifism as the conviction that nothing matters as much as love, kindness, respect, seeking wholeness.  Hence, nothing that would justify violence matters enough to override the commitment to love.  In my understanding, pacifism is a worldview, a way of looking at reality;[2] there is a pacifist way of knowing, a pacifist way of perceiving, of discerning, of negotiating life.

The term “nonviolence” is recently prominent as a near-synonym for pacifism.  I will use the terms interchangeably, though if we trying to be truly precise, we could find nuances that might make us want to differentiate between the two terms.[3]

My definition of pacifism more in positive, worldview terms links more closely with the logic of the biblical story than simply defining pacifism as the rejection of warfare.  The Bible, famously, does not overtly reject warfare for believers; in fact, in certain notorious cases the Bible actually commends, even commands, God’s people fighting.[4]

However, Christian pacifists – who believe that Jesus’ life and teaching is the center point of the Bible, the angle for reading the rest – see in Jesus sharp clarity about the supremacy of love, peacableness, compassion.  That is, Jesus embodies a broad and deep vision of life that is thoroughly pacifist, even if he did not explicitly address participation in warfare.[5]

I will mention four basic biblical themes that find clarity in Jesus, but in numerous ways emerge throughout the biblical story.  These provide the foundational theological rationale for Christian pacifism.  They include first and most basic, the love command that Jesus gave as a summary of the biblical message.  The second theme is Jesus’ vision for love-oriented politics in contrast to the tyranny of the world’s empires.  The third theme is Jesus’ optimism about the human potential for living in love.  And the fourth theme is the model of Jesus’ cross that embodies self-suffering love and exposes the nature of the structures of human culture as God’s rivals for the trust of human beings.

Jesus’ love command

One of Jesus’ most famous sayings may be found in Matthew 22.  Someone asks Jesus, which is the greatest of the commandments, and Jesus responds: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (22:34-40).

Mark and Luke also report this assertion (though Luke puts the actual words in the mouth of Jesus’ questioner) – as does Paul, in a slightly modified form, (Romans 13:8-10).  I see three keys points being made here that are crucial for our concerns.  First, love is at the heart of everything for the believer in God.  Second, love of God and love of neighbor are tied inextricably together.  In Jesus’ own life and teaching, we clearly see that he understood the “neighbor” to be the person in need, the person that one is able to show love to in concrete ways (not to be an insider over against non-neighbors who are “other” and whom we are not expected to love).  The third point is that Jesus understood his words to be a summary of the Bible – that is, what Christians now call the Old Testament.  The Law and Prophets were the entirety of Jesus’ Bible – and in his view, their message may be summarized by this double love command.  He quotes Deuteronomy and Leviticus directly in making his statement.

In his call to love, Jesus directly links human beings loving even their enemies with God loving all people.  “I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven: for he makes his son rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Mt 5:44-45).  These words of Jesus, of course, are part of his lengthy manifesto on faithful living known as the Sermon on the Mount.  Near the beginning of this manifesto, he makes it clear again that his message of peace follows directly from the Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament).  “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Mt 5:17).

Just as the double love command comes directly from the law and prophets, so too the call to imitate God’s love for all people (with its implication, as Jesus asserts, of loving even enemies) comes from the law and prophets.  Of course, the Old Testament gives a wide variety of impressions of God’s attitude toward the Hebrews enemies.  However, Jesus’ message has deep grounding throughout the biblical story, and he provides a hermeneutic for understanding the peace message (shalom) as the core message of the Bible.

From the start, the Bible presents God as willing peace for human beings – for all human beings.  And, crucially, God’s means for this love for “all the families of the earth” to be channeled through a community formed through God’s election of them as a people of the promise.[6]  The story makes it clear that this election is pure mercy – God’s persevering love for God’s elect is itself an expression of God’s love for enemies.  Time after time, the story makes clear, the people turn from God.  Yet, as the prophet Hosea reports, God ultimately does not respond with violence and wrath, but with healing love.

The original calling of Abraham and Sarah and the gift to them of descendants in spite of their barrenness (and their unfaithfulness), the saving work of God to bring the Hebrew people together and to free them from slavery in Egypt (again, as the story makes clear, saving work in spite of the Hebrews’ unfaithfulness), the gift of Torah to guide their lives as the people of the promise (a priestly kingdom mediating God’s love to the entire world), and many more gifts, including the gift of new life even after the fall of the Hebrew nation state (a fall that Hebrew prophets attributed directly to the people’s unfaithfulness) – all of these gifts clearly portray God’s love as unearned, even undeserved.

The basic guidance that Jesus draws from the story of God with God’s people, the story that he understood himself to stand within, may be summarized in Jesus’ words as reported by Luke:  “Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.  Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:35-36).

In articulating the centrality of love in this way, Jesus makes clear that he reads the Bible this way.  The love command summarizes the law and prophets and provides the fundamental way that his followers should orient their lives in the world.  That is to say, if we understand pacifism as the placing of the highest priority on love, Jesus provides here Christians’ central grounding for pacifism.

Following after Jesus, we find in later New Testament writers a parallel portrayal of the centrality of love, even for enemies, as a reflection of the way God loves.  I will only mention Paul’s letter to the Romans.  In chapter five, Paul writes of God’s immense love for us that reaches out to us in Jesus’ life and death, “while we were still sinners,” “while we were enemies” (Rom 5:8,10).  A little later, Paul (who also understood himself as, like Jesus, capturing the core message of the Bible [i.e., the Old Testament]) echoes Jesus’ summary of the core message of Torah: “The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom 13:9-10).

So, the first and most basic biblical theme grounding Christian pacifism, finding clarity in Jesus but reflecting the biblical story as a whole, is the centrality of the love command.  The love command provides the central building block for Christian pacifism – both in the positive sense of establishing love as the highest ethical standard that can never be secondary to some other possibly violence-justifying ethical value and in the negative sense of providing the basis for rejecting the participation in war as a morally acceptable choice.

An alternative politics

Our second biblical theme compliments the love command.  Jesus articulated a sharp critique of power politics and sought to create a counter-cultural community independent of nation states in their dependence upon the sword.[7]  Jesus indeed was political – he was confessed to be a king (which is what Messiah, or Christ, meant).  He was executed by the Empire as a political criminal.  However, Jesus’ politics were upside-down politics.[8]  Jesus expressed his political philosophy in a nutshell when he responded to his disciples’ angling for status.  “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so among you; whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:42-43).

In making this contrast between the politics of the “Gentile nations” (such as, of course, the Roman Empire, the one Gentile nation Jesus knew about) and the politics of the followers of God, Jesus was not comparing apples and oranges.  He was not saying these represent two totally different realms of life.  He was, to the contrary, saying these are competing visions for the ordering of social life among human beings.

When Jesus accepted the title “Messiah,” when Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God as present and normative for his followers, when Jesus organized his followers around twelve disciples (thus echoing the way the ancient nation of Israel was organized) – he established a social movement centered around the love command, a movement focused on supporting people living transformed lives in the here and now, a movement that witnessed to the entire world the ways of God, the ways meant to be the norm for all human beings.

Jesus, however, very directly rejected the notion that this new movement he initiated would seek to imitate, even replace, Rome as the dominating Kingdom (Empire) based on its military might.  He rejected Satan’s offer at the beginning of his ministry to spearhead such a dominating kingdom.  Various times during the months that followed he turned from temptations to galvanize his growing following into a direct rival to Rome based, as Jesus alluded to at the end, on his ability to call down legions of angels to do battle for him.

Rather, Jesus spearheaded a movement meant to operate within the nations and empires of the world as an independent society operating according to the word of God rather than the rule of the sword.  The community Jesus founded actually modeled itself after the pattern established as long ago as during the ministry of the prophet Jeremiah.  Jeremiah’s words may have served to help the ancient Israelites survive as a distinct people.  He encouraged people of the covenant to seek the well-being of whatever society they were part of while at the same time maintaining their distinct identity as people of Torah.[9]

In light of Jesus’ message, and how that message lifts up Jeremiah’s prophetic word, the entire Old Testament may be read as a cautionary tale.  This tale concerns the failure of nation-state-centered, sword-oriented politics to be a viable vehicle for sustaining the people of God as people who will bless all the families of the earth.  The call to be a blessing, first given to Abraham, was later reiterated when both the prophet Micah and the prophet Isaiah foresaw a time when the nations of the world would come to Zion to learn the ways of peace, turning their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.  In light of Jeremiah and Jesus, one can see this prophecy of the spread of peace being carried out not through the violence of the standard nation state, but through the peaceable witness of counter-cultures scattered throughout the world in various nation states – counter-cultures that center their lives on the consistent embodiment of the double command to love God and neighbor.

Read this way, the Old Testament tells how the people’s original calling – articulated to Abraham and Sarah – to be a distinct community and to bless all the families of the earth ultimately headed down a dead end.  When the elders of the people of God choose to structure their common life in imitation of “the nations,” they undermined the intended blessing.  The story told in 1 Samuel 8 of the movement toward kingship reflects the ambivalence within the tradition concerning this choice.  The great prophet, Samuel, speaking for God, warns the elders that if they choose the kingship route their society might well be transformed from a Torah-shaped society toward an Egypt-shaped society.  Samuel warned that the king would simply take and take, build weapons of war, centralize his power, and leave the people once again crying out in their sorrow and suffering – just as they had generations earlier amidst their slavery in Egypt.

What follows in the Old Testament story is an account of the Israelite nation-state heading precisely in that direction.  The prophets offer critique after critique – Elijah challenges the land grab of King Ahab; Amos emphasizes Israel’s departure from Torah in its unjust treatment of vulnerable people; Hosea challenges Israel’s descent into violence.  Finally, Jeremiah actually accompanies some of the Israelite defeated leaders into Egypt (Jeremiah 42–44), symbolizing that Samuel’s warnings of Israel’s fate had been vindicated.

The story does not end, though.  The survival of the people of the promise did not require the assumed pillars of identity – the king’s palace and the temple.  These pillars lay in ruins, the nation-state fell, crushed by the Babylonian empire.  But the peoplehood, the promise to Abraham and Sarah, the call to be a blessing to all the families of the earth remained, even after the Israelite nation-state bit the dust.  Through this failure, the true nature of God’s promise became more clear to prophets such as Jeremiah, with his exhortation to the people of the promise to seek the peace of the city wherein they were living.  This was actually a call for the people to embrace their existence in diaspora – an existence that did indeed continue for generation upon generation separate from any kind of Israelite nation-state.

So, Jesus actually followed in close continuity with the Old Testament story with his message calling upon his hearers to embrace once again their vocation to spread the message of God’s love, making “disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19), a vocation most decidedly not dependent upon the centralized, coercive political power of a nation-state.  The power of the sword-wielding state proved not only to be unnecessary for the carrying out of this promise, it actually almost corrupted the promise beyond recognition.

A couple of generations after Jesus, another prophet, John of Patmos, reiterated this basic message juxtaposing and contrasting the ways of empires and nations and the ways of God’s politics.  As one of its central themes, the Book of Revelation poses Babylon and the New Jerusalem as competing alternatives for followers of Jesus.  In this way, Revelation echoes the choice Jesus presented his followers – join uncritically in the social order wherein rulers lord it over their subjects, or join in an alternative social order wherein greatness is manifested in servanthood.  From start to finish in Revelation, the pattern of Jesus (the king of kings – a political leader) is presented as one of suffering love followed by martyrdom followed by God’s vindication.[10]

The final section of Revelation directly compares and contrasts the two cities (or empires or kingdoms).  First the angel shows John Babylon, then Jerusalem.  One is the way of power politics (and death); the other is the way of suffering servanthood (and life).  And these two alternatives are not about life in the hereafter, they are about life in the here and now.  “Choose this day whom you will serve.”

So, we have two foundational themes at the heart of Jesus’ message that catch up enduring elements of the Old Testament story and find resonance in later New Testament writings, themes that provide the theological heart of Christian pacifism – (1) the double command to love God and neighbor combined with (2) the vision for an upside-down politics, an alternative to the sword-based politics of the nations and empires of the world.  The critique of the nations’ politics frees followers of the Way to commit themselves to the love command as their highest commitment – even if that means being “disloyal” to whatever nation-state wherein they happen to reside.

That is, these two themes of love and alternative politics assert a disjunction between God’s ways of working among human beings, on the one hand, and power politics on the other.  The king, the emperor, the president – these are not likely to be God’s agents.  More likely, they are rebels against God – the forces who persecute, even put to death God’s genuine prophets.  Christian pacifism rests upon this disillusionment toward the powers and this commitment to placing the highest loyalty on the community of faith and its counter-cultural politics.

Optimism about the potential for human faithfulness

The third theme from Jesus’ life and teaching that undergirds Christian pacifism may be seen in his approach to ethical exhortation.  I will discuss this more briefly.  Jesus displayed a profound optimism about the potential his listeners had to follow his directives for life.  Certainly, Jesus spoke to human sinfulness, the corruptions of selfishness, blind ambition, domination, and deception.  However, when he said “follow me,” he clearly expected people to do so – here and now, effectively, consistently, fruitfully.

Perhaps Jesus’ most famous extended set of teachings, what we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount, begins with a series of straightforward affirmations – you are genuinely humble, you genuinely seek justice, you genuinely make peace, you genuinely walk the path of faithfulness even to the point of suffering severe persecution as a consequence.

So, when Jesus calls upon his followers to love their neighbors, to reject the tyrannical patterns of leadership among the kings of the earth, to share generously with those in need, to offer forgiveness seventy times seven times, he actually expected that this could be done.[11]

Jesus’ optimism about human possibilities reflects a central theme throughout the Bible – a theme sometimes not noticed amidst the continual litany of human failures and disappointments in relation to living out of Torah.  The human dynamic, according to the Bible, reflects a great deal of alienation.  The Bible makes clear the incredible patience and mercy of God in responding to wayward human beings.  Nonetheless, at the heart of Torah and at the heart of the prophets’ exhortations we see the assumption that indeed human beings are capable of walking in the paths of justice and shalom.

The biblical problem is not so much that human beings are incapable of following God’s will for their lives.  The biblical problem is that in spite of their capabilities for faithfulness, human beings nonetheless all too often turn away.  And in turning away, in worshiping idols, human beings find themselves in bondage to social dynamics of oppression, greed, and violence.  However, from the start, the remedy is always at hand – simply turn back, repent and trust in God.  Faithfulness may then follow.

So, again, Jesus offers not radical innovation when he begins his ministry with these words: “Repent and believe in the good news.  The kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15).  Everything that he said in the months that followed presupposed that repentance (that is, simply turning back to God) is all that it takes for people to enter into fellowship with God and live as people of humility, people who hunger and thirst for justice and peace, people who persevere even in the face of persecution and suffering.

When Jesus called his followers to make kindness and love, even for enemies, the kind of priority that can never be overridden by some other value (that is, when Jesus established the basis for pacifism), he expected that this indeed would be possible.

The model of the cross

The fourth theme from Jesus’ life and teaching that undergirds Christian pacifism may be seen in his willingness to persevere in the path of love even when that brought him suffering and death.  Jesus’ cross serves as a model for his followers.[12]  At the heart of his teaching stands the often repeated saying, “Take up your cross and follow me.”  He insisted that just as he was persecuted for his way of life, so will his followers be as well.

The powers that be, the religious and political institutions, the spiritual and human authorities, responded to Jesus’ inclusive, confrontive, barrier-shattering compassion and generosity with violence.  At its heart, Jesus’ cross may be seen as embodied pacifism, a refusal to turn from the ways of peace even when they are costly.  So his call to his followers to share in his cross is also a call to his followers to embody pacifism.

Jesus’ cross certainly puts the lie to the idea that consistent, lived-out pacifism is passive, safe, and withdrawn.  Jesus’ way of peace led to conflict – not conflict stemming from his own belligerence, but conflict stemming from deeply entrenched characteristics in the structures of human society that resist freedom and compassion.  Jesus’ cross besides pointing to pacifism in terms of his style of life, also points away from trusting in the swords and spears of empires and institutional religion – these are the very structures of human social life that killed Jesus.

Again, we can see foreshadowings of Jesus’ path in the Old Testament story.  The first empire we learn about there, Pharaoh’s Egypt, embodies structural violence in its enslavement of the Hebrew people.  Pharaoh’s Egypt shows empire’s pattern of response to resistance to that structural violence in its hostility toward Moses and toward the fruit of Moses’ work of empowering the Hebrews.

Tragically, the nation-state ultimately formed by the descendants of Moses imitated Egypt both in its injustices and its violent hostility toward those prophets who dared to speak out against the state’s structural injustices.  The prophets’ message endured, though, even though they did not have coercive force to use to protect it or to impose it on their society.

After Jesus, we see his suffering servanthood lifted up as the basic pattern for faithfulness in the Book of Revelation – the basic pattern of Jesus is stated at the beginning of the book: “the faithful witness (or ‘martyr,’ the Greek word is martys), the first born of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth” (Rev 1:5).  Jesus is portrayed as simultaneously the one who suffers violence without retaliation, the one whom God honors and exalts, and the one who serves as the true ruler of the world.

Jesus’ pattern is held up as the model for his followers – the ones who are healed by God are the ones who “follow the Lamb wherever he goes” (Rev 14:4),” the ones who refuse to kill with the sword (Rev 13:10).  Those who “conquer” in God’s way in Revelation, conquer with suffering love.  Those who “conquer” in the Beast’s way, conquer with violence.

As we come to the end of the biblical period, we may see this fourfold basis for pacifism – the love command, the calling to give loyalty to the counter-cultural community of God’s people over loyalty to the Empire, the belief that faithful human beings can be empowered to follow Jesus in the here and now, and the model of the pattern of Jesus – suffering love even to the point of death with the promise of God’s vindication.

The persistence of Christian pacifism

For a number of generations following the time of Jesus, those who named themselves his followers indeed did generally express a commitment to pacifism.  The pacifism of the early Christians shows that those closest in history to Jesus did indeed understand his message calling them both to radical love that precluded violence and to resistance to the domination system centered in the Empire’s call to give it their highest loyalty.[13]

We may, thus, call pacifism Christianity’s original position, or, we could say, its default position.  Jesus was killed around 30 CE.  The first evidence of Christians serving in the Roman military date around 170 CE.  While this indicates that pacifism was not the absolute norm for all Christians by that time – nonetheless, the only reason we know about this incident is because of church leaders speaking against military involvement.  In fact, it is not until after the beginning of the 4^th century that church leaders openly articulate an acceptance Christians in the military.

Of course, when this change from pacifism to acceptance of military involvement came, it came decisively – indicating that the way had been prepared for quite some time.  Probably the most central factor then, and in the generations down to our present day, in Christians turning away from their default pacifist position was a rejection of the distinction between loyalty to the community of faith and loyalty to the nation-state.  When Christians merge these two loyalties, the community of faith and the state seen as being in harmony, Christians understand themselves as appropriately accepting the state’s call to take up arms.  If, at the beginning of the fourth century, no Christians leaders were affirming involvement in the military, by the end of the fourth century, Christian leaders affirmed such involvement to the extent that only Christians were allowed in the Roman army.

Christian pacifism survived, but at the margins the church, as the conviction of just a tiny minority of Christians.  As rule, Christian pacifism surfaced among small groups that in some sense may be seen as restorationist movements, groups that tried to restore a more Jesus-oriented, Gospels-based approach to faith.  A few of these groups managed to stay in good standing with the Catholic Church – monastic movements such at the Benedictines and Franciscans to some extent championed a Gospels-oriented spirituality.  A number of other pacifist groups were considered heretical – the Waldensians in northern Italy in the 12^th century, the Czech Brethren in the 15^th century, the Anabaptists in the 16^th century.  The Waldensians and Czech Brethren in time gave up their pacifism, but the Anabaptist movement spawned several direct successors, Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish, that have remained pacifist down to the present.[14]

All of these pacifist groups followed pretty closely after the four themes I have mentioned – understanding Jesus’ love command as the center of their ethics, privileging their faith communities over the state, believing that present-day faithfulness is possible, and understanding persecution and suffering to be the expected response of the wider world to their convictions.

A little more than one hundred years after the beginning of the Anabaptist movement, a British radical named George Fox led a movement in England that sought to apply Christian pacifism more widely.  Members of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, not only shared the Anabaptist view of the genuine possibility of the Christian to follow Jesus’ love command in present life, they also had a sense of optimism about the possibilities of responsiveness to the love command in the wider world.[15]  For the first time, pacifism entered into the world of government with the establishment of colonial Pennsylvania, the “holy experiment” founded by the Quaker William Penn.

Colonial Pennsylvania pioneered many values and practices shaped by Quaker pacifism – such as religious toleration and attempts to live peaceably with Native Americans.  After a couple of generations, Quakers became a smaller and smaller minority within the colony, and ultimately under pressure due to what was called the French and Indian War of 1756, Quakers withdrew from leadership in Pennsylvania.  Their influence in United States history has been incalculable, however.[16]  Not coincidentally, it has been in North America that Christian pacifism has taken hold the strongest.

Pacifism expands

The gradual emergence of pacifism beyond the peace churches, Mennonites, Quakers, and Church of the Brethren, may be dated to the first half of the 19^th century with the formation of several peace societies in the United States, a few which became linked with the movement to end slavery.[17]  William Lloyd Garrison, an important abolitionist, remained deeply committed to pacifism as the best philosophy for fostering genuine social change – though when the efforts to end slavery ultimately led to the American Civil War, Garrison more or less remained silent, implicitly at least accepting that the abolition of slavery took priority over pure pacifism.

In the twentieth-century, massive violence and oppression, two world wars, nuclear weapons, colonialism and continual militarism brought forth a great expansion of the efforts of pacifists.  By the mid-20^th century, two of the world’s most famous figures, a secular Jew Albert Einstein, and an atheist, Bertrand Russell, joined to author a manifesto that voiced the convictions of an increasing number of Christians as well: “Shall we put an end to the human race or shall we put an end to war?”  It is our choice, one or the other.

Pacifist opposition to the 20^th-century’s first “Great War,” what tragically became known as only the first of two world wars, was muted, at least as measured by the small number of draftees who claimed conscientious objector status.  Opposition to the war in the United States, which was of course quite widespread, tended to be framed in political terms; as the title of a famous post-war book termed it, when Christians were faced with how to respond to the Great War, preachers presented arms.[18]  A peace church, the General Conference Mennonite Church, decided to withdraw from the newly formed Federal Council of Churches because of the strong support for the war expressed by the Council.

However, great disaffection came to be articulated about the Great War in the years after it ended.  A widespread, if somewhat shallow, peace movement emerged in the 1930s.  Ironically, though, when World War II began, most of the churches of North America again expressed strong support.  To illustrate this volatility, in the late 1930s, the Methodist Church in the United States issued an official statement vowing never again to support war.  Only a few years later, following Pearl Harbor, that same body pledged its full support for the American war effort.

Because of the clarity of political support the US military actions had, pacifists remained marginal and quiet during the war years.  However, whereas in World War I, just about 4,000 men served as conscientious objectors in the US, almost all from the peace churches, during World War II about 12,000 COs performed alternative service, only about one-half from the peace churches.[19]

It took an Indian Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi, to demonstrate the potential of nonviolent action for effecting social change without bloodshed.  Gandhi, of course, drew deep inspiration from the life and teaching of Jesus – and, in turn, inspired 20^th-century Christians to take more seriously the possible confluence between the quest for social change and pacifism.[20]

Following World War II, an increasing number of concerned people began to explore the application of Gandhian approaches to the need for racial justice in the United States.  A number of Christian pacifists who had been COs during World War II – such as Bayard Rustin, Dave Dellinger, and A.J. Muste – worked at this application.  However, it took a younger Baptist preacher, who actually did not enter the Civil Rights movement as a committed pacifist, to establish the linkage between civil rights activism and nonviolence in a way that captured the imagination of millions.  Martin Luther King, Jr., did end his all too short life espousing a principled pacifism, but it was forged through on the ground experience more than a beginning point based on theology or philosophy.[21]

The twentieth-century saw tremendous expansion of Christian pacifism; surely a much higher percentage of Christians came to understand themselves as pacifists than had ever since the fourth century.

Besides simply the growing horror of total war, the belief that we must end war or perish as a species, and besides the unprecedented awareness of the usefulness of nonviolence as a strategy for social change, the twentieth-century also saw a flowering of intellectually sophisticated writing on pacifism by Christian theologians – from mainstream Protestant circles, from Quakers, from Mennonites – but also, amazingly given Christian history, from Roman Catholics.  A huge factor in the growth of pacifism among Roman Catholics was the life and testimony of Dorothy Day, founder and spiritual heart of the Catholic Worker movement and its hospitality houses and newspaper.[22]

Day is credited by many as the person most responsible for the growth of pacifism among American Catholics – a growth reflected in the fact that during World War I, it is known that there was one Roman Catholic CO, during World War II there were a few more than 100, and during the Vietnam War, there were more Roman Catholic COs than from any other Christian group – tens of thousands out of the total of around 180,000 US COs during that conflict.[23]

Inspired by Day, and then inspiring others in their own right, radical pacifist Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan gained wide notoriety as opponents to the Vietnam War and then as intense activists resisting the nuclear arms race.  Another important Catholic pacifist who, like the Berrigans, both wrote important theological treatises and put his life on the line as an activist, was James Douglass.[24]

As we enter the 21^st century, Christian pacifism continues to expand.  The basically nonviolent ending of apartheid and of Communist totalitarianism in Eastern Europe have inspired pacifists to continue to imagine how nonviolence can serve as an alternative to violent revolution.  As well, the influence of theologians of nonviolence such as John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and Walter Wink[25] reaches wider and wider, among mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Evangelicals.[26]

The “blank check” and critical just war thought

Of course, pacifists still remain a small minority among Christians throughout the world and in the United States.  The growth in influence of pacifist convictions surely has been dwarfed by the militaristic and nationalistic “Christianity” of the “Christian right.”  According to surveys, being self-identified as a Christian makes an American more likely than a non-Christian to support capital punishment or the war on Iraq.  We remain a long way from the default position of Christianity’s pacifism.

The decisive move away from the default position, of course, came many, many years ago.  Today’s militaristic and nationalistic Christians are in many ways closer to the actual Christian tradition than pacifists.  The emergence of Constantine the Great as the supreme leader of the Roman Empire at the turn of the fourth century often is seen as the key symbol of the end of pacifism as the characteristic position of Christianity.

Each of the fourfold bases for pacifism in the Bible discussed above were transformed.  The love command became more of an attitudinal than overt ethical concern.  The church as counter-culture in contrast to the Empire became the state-church.  Christianity became more pessimistic about human possibilities in this life.  The cross came to symbolize Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for sin rather than a model for politically dangerous compassion and dissent.

The fourth century provides us with the key symbols that provide a framework for understanding the general practical philosophy of Christianity toward warfare.  Constantine the Emperor at the beginning of the century and Augustine the Bishop at the end of the century may be said to reflect two poles within post-pacifist Christianity.

If pacifism is Christianity’s default position, then to move to post-pacifism, to accept warfare, required some kind of justification.  What become the bases for making this change?  As far as I know, we have no evidence of a careful debate presenting reasons for this change in the fourth century.  Rather, it would appear that the basic justification for acceptance of warfare emerged by osmosis.  This “justification” was simply that it is the responsibility of the Christian citizen to defer to the judgment of the emperor or king.  I will call this justification the “blank check.”

Constantine symbolizes the acceptance by Christians of the role of national leaders in determining the justifiability of war.  In deferring to national leaders and national interests concerning warfare, the large majority of Christians have essentially uncritically understood it to be their responsibility simply to obey their government when it calls upon them to fight – that is, to give the government a blank check.[27]

The other pole of the post-pacifist context concerning Christians and war may be called the “critical just war” approach.  I mention Augustine as symbolizing this approach because he is often considered the father of the just war tradition.  And we do find in Augustine’s writings many scattered comments alluding to criteria for just wars – both in terms of just causes and of just tactics and behavior in war.  These criteria provide material for a critical approach to warfare – bases for criticizing rationales for war and for saying no to unjust tactics.

However, we must also remember that Augustine never articulated a formal just war philosophy with organized, systematic lists of criteria that could actually function as a critical resource for Christian responses to warfare.  He was at most ad hoc and suggestive in what he wrote.  His actual approach in practice was much closer to the blank check – as seen in his core assertion that the ordinary Christian has no responsibility for discerning justifiable rationales or tactics.  The ordinary Christian is to defer to one’s leaders, to recognize that the leaders are accountable to God, ordinary Christians are accountable only to their human leaders.[28]

It is not until the 16^th century that we have a systematic delineation of the just war criteria as a formal statement – and even that statement had no official status with any church or governmental body.  I would suggest that it is only with the 20^th century that the critical just war pole among post-pacifist Christianity began to play a genuinely critical role.  For most of the past seventeen centuries, the fundamental approach to warfare among the vast majority of Christians has been the blank check – the basic Christian responsibility has been simply to follow the dictates of their government.  Only in this way could you have war after war where Christians take up arms against other Christians.

Nonetheless, just as the century of total war stimulated an unprecedented expansion of the numbers of Christian pacifists and the creative application of pacifist convictions to a wide range of issues, so also did the 20^th century lead to an enlivening of the critical just war approach.

The enlivening of critical just war thought

During World War II, a prominent American Catholic moral theologian, John C. Ford, articulated an unusual critique of the Allies’ use of saturation bombing as going beyond the what the principle of just means in warfare would allow.  Ford’s critique was unusual in that it was expressed as the war was still going on – though he was also careful to make clear that he was not questioning the overall moral legitimacy of the Allied war effort.[29]

The events of August 1945 changed application of just war principles forever.  The use of nuclear weapons galvanized an outpouring of horror at the incredible level of destruction visited by those weapons.  Eventually a position called “nuclear pacifism” emerged – a view based on just war criteria that says, ahead of time, that a nuclear war could never be justifiable.  So, here, just war criteria actually become a basis for opposing real wars (and, implicitly, for opposing one’s government’s policies).  “Nuclear pacifism” among Christians received a tremendous boost with the 1983 pastoral letter from the United States Roman Catholic bishops that pointed strongly toward nuclear pacifism.[30]

Also as a consequence of World War II, a challenge to the blank check’s assumption that citizen’s must simply obey their governments (and leave moral accountability to governmental and military leaders) was articulated amidst the war crimes trials of Nazis.  The so-called Nuremberg principles asserted that each soldier has the responsibility to say no to unjust orders.  This responsibility could be seen as a personalization of the critical just war approach, where each person in a sense becomes a judge of justifiability – and accountable for how he or she behaves in relation to what is understood to be unjust behavior.

In the 1960s, for the first time the United States engaged in an extended war that did not meet with overwhelming public support.  During the Vietnam War, a new category emerged, “selective conscientious objection.”  This category included people who objected to participation in this particular war – not because they were pacifists but because they believed that that particular war was unjust.  Selective conscientious objection was never accepted as a legitimate basis to gain legal conscientious objector status – though surely many of the unprecedentedly large number of COs during that war were closer to being selective COs than total pacifists, but somehow managed to convince their draft boards to classify them as COs.

Just war thought served a critical function in fostering a refusal to participate in what seen as an unjust war.  Just war thought served, as well, as a resource for those who actively opposed a was as it was being fought and not only after the fact.

Finally, in the run up to our current war on Iraq, widespread public opposition found expression in massive demonstrations and various articulations of dissent to government policies.  Even among pacifists, the arguments expressed in public opposing the war were framed, as a rule, in just war terms – this was not a last resort, there was not a legitimate authority (that is, the United Nations) declaring war, it is a war of aggression not self-defense.  Never before in American history has such an outpouring of opposition been expressed in advance of military action.[31]

So, what has emerged over the past sixty years with the Nuremberg principles, nuclear pacifism, selective conscientious objection, and pre-war opposition to military action, has been a revitalized just war tradition.

Christian pacifists should warmly welcome these developments among those who have used just war thinking in critical ways in recent years.  We may be seeing a confluence among Christian pacifists who have learned from Gandhi and King that nonviolence can be a force for social change and critical just war people who have learned from the events of the past century that we must find ways to end war or it will end us.[32]

I believe that Christian pacifism, nonetheless, still remains grounded in central theological affirmations, not simply a commonsense awareness of the folly of modern warfare.  Christian pacifism follows from the confession that love for all people (love, even, for our enemies) is our highest, never to be overridden, ethical commitment.  Such love forbids the use of violence.

For Christian pacifists, this confession of the supremacy of love is inextricably linked with our belief in Jesus as the normative revelation of the God who created the universe.  Jesus reveals God to be a God of love – and Jesus reveals the harmony with this God requires that we, in turn, be people of love.

Ted Grimsrud

Revelation 2:1-29—Shalom Mennonite Congregation—November 13, 2011

Imagine getting something by mail-order, say a computer, that you have to do some assembly on before you can use it, like maybe add some memory. You want to save some money and do it yourself. It seems so easy. And imagine that this computer and the memory chips come with instructions telling you how to install the memory. But then imagine you think you know what you are doing, so you don’t bother with the instructions. What might happen?

Well, I can imagine this scenario pretty easily, since I lived it. And what happened was that I tried to force the memory chip into place the wrong way and ended up breaking the memory chip holder. Not too bright.

I thought about that embarrassing memory as I was reflecting on the role that chapters 2 and 3 play in the book of Revelation. These chapters contain messages to seven churches in cities in northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. Most typically, these letters are read as our last moments of sanity before we enter into the craziness of Revelation’s visions. But we don’t usually think of them as the key to understanding the visions.

I think that’s what they are, though. The seven messages are kind of the instructions for understanding the rest of the book. To interpret the visions without paying close attention to the letters is like my trying to install the memory in my new computer without looking at the instructions.

So, today and in my next sermon I want to reflect on the seven messages as giving us a window into what comes later. These messages provide our interpretive key for the book as a whole. They tell us what John’s urgent concerns were and they tell us what purposes the wild and crazy visions to come will serve.

Revelation 2

Let me first read an abbreviated version of chapter two, the first four messages. As I am reading, think about what they might be telling us about the purpose of Revelation. What do you think John’s agenda might include based in these messages?

These are words from Jesus:

To the angel of the church at Ephesus write: These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands: I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance. I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers. I also know that you are enduring patiently for the sake of my name. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love that you had at first. Remember from what you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. Yet this is to your credit: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. To everyone who conquers, I will give permission to eat from the tree of life that is in the paradise of God.

And to Smyrna write: These are the words of the first and the last, who was dead and came to life: I know your affliction and your poverty, even though you are rich. I know the slander on the part of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Beware the devil is about to throw some of you into prison so that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have affliction. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life. Whoever conquers will not be harmed by the second death.

And to Pergamum write: These are the words of him who has a sharp two-edged sword: I know where you are living, where Satan’s throne is. Yet you hold fast to my name, and you did not deny your faith in me even in the days of Antipas my witness, who was killed among you. But I have a few things against you: you have some who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who put a stumbling block before the people of Israel, so that they would eat food sacrificed to idols and practice fornication. So you also have some who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent then. If not, I will come to you soon and make war against them with the sword of my mouth. To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it.

And to Thyatira write: These are the words of the Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. I know your works—your love, faith, service, and patient endurance. Your last works are greater than the first. But I have this against you: you tolerate Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is beguiling my servants to practice fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols. She refuses to repent. Beware I am throwing her on a bed, and those who commit adultery with her I am throwing into great distress. But to those who do not hold this teaching, I say, hold fast to what you have until I come. To everyone who conquers and continues to do my works to the end, I will give authority over the nations; to rule them with an iron rod. To the one who conquers I will also give the morning star.

So, what do you think John is concerned about?…

John’s Main Concern: Negotiating Living in Empire

In general, I think John’s main concern is with how the people in the churches will negotiate living in the Roman Empire—the visions that follow will in their own creative ways repeat what John conveys here: confrontation to those who too easily find themselves at ease in Babylon (that is, in the empire) and comfort to those who have sought to follow the way of the Lamb and have suffered because of that.

We might get some wrong impressions from a quick reading of these messages. We might think that when Jesus condemns “fornication” he is concerned with sex. We might think the reference to the “synagogue of Satan” is about Judaism. And we might think that what’s at stake here are religious beliefs. Well, it’s a bit more complicated.

“Fornication” is an old prophetic metaphor for when the community of faith in the Old Testament turned from the ways of Torah—trusting in idols, wealthy people exploiting the vulnerable, trusting in weapons of war. To “commit fornication” in this figurative way is to forget the call to justice, to forget the call to compassion, to forget the call to care for those in need—to forget that true worship is to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

The reference in the message to Smyrna seems to pit Christians against Jews. But that is not actually the case. John and other Christians would have thought of themselves as Jews. The conflict here is not between Christians and non-Christians but between two different ways of envisioning being the people of God. What was at stake was their attitude toward the empire. This charge—and John puts some sharp words into Jesus’ mouth in these message—of being a “synagogue of Satan” has to do with being too tight with the empire, which is linked elsewhere in Revelation with the Dragon, the great snake, that is, Satan.

The city of Pergamum, we are told, is where “Satan’s throne” is—Satan’s throne being a major regional center for emperor worship. In John’s view, the Roman Empire is a force for evil in the world, not a representative of the true God as it claimed. Partly, the empire—to use Paul’s language—sought to separate believers from God. It did that in many ways, but probably most fundamentally by its ideology of power as domination. Rome was ruthless, nations and peoples who did not go along were crushed—witness the thousands of Jews who were crucified by the empire before and after Jesus’ execution.

So, what’s at stake here in these messages is most of all the politics of empire versus the politics of the Kingdom of God, the politics of Babylon versus the politics of the New Jerusalem. To which vision of ways humans relate to one another will those in the churches commit themselves? Certainly, these are religious commitments—but not religion as doctrinal belief or rituals so much as religion linked inextricably with social ethics. How do believers negotiate empire?

The Empire’s Threat to Faith

John is deeply concerned with the powerful currents in his culture that push believers to forget Jesus’ way of being in the world. The empire gives the message that it does represent the gods and that because of this its power is to be feared and accepted as definitive. The villains in the messages to the seven churches, though, are not the beast and dragon, the false prophet and Babylon. No, the villains are people in the churches who advocate cooperation with empire.

The characters from the Old Testament, Balaam and Jezebel, were notorious for persuading those in Israel to turn away from faithfulness to the ways of Torah toward the ways of domination. One telling story, from 1 Kings, shows Jezebel, an outsider to Israel not bound to Torah, persuading her husband, Israel’s king Ahab, to seize a vineyard he wants simply because he has the power to. As we learn, though, this vineyard was part of the inheritance system that was meant to protect future generations from landlessness and poverty—core concerns of Torah. Jezebel’s influence turned Ahab away from justice, away from shalom.

This is what John sees happening in these churches, too—leaders, teachers, influential people claiming that working in harmony with the wishes of the empire was totally appropriate for the faith community. They could go to the public religious services, do business, gain wealth and status, identify with the values of the empire—and then come back to their churches for a time of private worship. Rome says that’s fine—we in the churches should accept this too.

So what John sets to do in what follows in Revelation is try to show what is really going on when followers of Jesus accept this drive to accommodate. When you accommodate to your culture, he says, you actual accommodate with the beast, with the dragon, with Satan himself. In a later vision, he will state starkly why this is a problem. At the end of a list of all the fine things that Rome produces and that are apparently being enjoyed by followers of Balaam and Jezebel in the churches is this jarring reminder: the merchants also traffic in slaves—and human lives (18:13). And in Rome is found “the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slaughtered on earth” (18:24).

This is the negative part of John’s agenda—to confront those who seek to accommodate, who seek to keep the message of the gospel to the private corners of their lives, who find the comfort and security that getting along with Rome promises. The “peace of Rome” is built on the bones of “all who have been slaughtered on earth.” This is not genuine peace, but systemic  violence of the most unjust and oppressive kind.

John’s Postive Agenda

But John’s bigger agenda is positive. John seeks to convey a message of hope and encouragement. Resist the beast, refuse to accommodate, keep the gospel as central to all elements of your lives—and you will celebrate with the Lamb and with the multitudes who follow him.

The messages contain threats, some strong threats. I’ll reflect on those more in my next sermon. More importantly, they contain promises. A key motif throughout the book is the call to “conquer,” to be victorious (the Greek word here for “victory” is niké). This is the heart of Revelation’s message: there are two fundamental ways to conquer: one is to conquer through overwhelming force; the second is to conquer through persistent love. One is to cause the other to suffer; the second is what Gandhi called self-suffering.

The messages promise that those who conquer in the same way Jesus conquered—through persistent love and self-suffering—will be vindicated. The conquerors from Ephesus will “eat from the tree of life that is in the paradise of God”—an allusion to the tree of life in the New Jerusalem in chapters 21 and 22 that will heal the nations. The conquerors from Smyrna will “not be harmed by the second death”—an allusion to the embrace into eternal life by God at the Great White Throne of judgment in chapter 20. The conquerors from Pergamum will be given manna and a white stone that gives them entry into the New Jerusalem. And the conquerors from Thyatira will be given the morning star, an allusion to the final reference in the book of Revelation to Jesus, who is called the morning star (22:16).

The message to the church at Smyrna captures Revelation’s notion of power quite clearly. “I know your affliction and your poverty, even though you are rich” (2:9). You are weak but really you are powerful. The corollary point is that the Empire that seems so almighty and hence attractive to the Jezebels and Balaams, actually is weak in its apparent strength.

Power in Weakness

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt about fifty years ago wrote about how violence actually is powerless. “Power and violence are opposites,” she wrote. “Where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Therefore, to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant.” Arendt held that power is created not when some people coerce others but when they willingly take action together in support of common purposes. She stated that “while violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it.” Then she added a sentence that perfectly captures the experience of the United States in the world this past generation: “From this results the by no means infrequent political combination of force and powerlessness, an array of impotent forces that spend themselves often spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility” (from Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World).

The problem in the churches of Revelation is that some influential people bought the claims of empire to be truly powerful and argued that Christians should accommodate to those claims. Later on, in chapter 13, John will see visions that illustrate just how impressive Rome’s power seemed—but the visions reveal that power not to be life-giving power as claimed by Rome (and those in the churches who wanted to be at home in the empire) but rather to be satanic power, the power of domination and death. But still, it’s overwhelming—“Who is like the beast and who can stand against it?”

Here we find one of our big challenges in thinking about the message of Revelation. How much does this portrayal of empire as beastly apply to our context in 21^st century America? How much does the challenge about accommodation apply to 21^st century American Christians? Where do we find communities of creative resistance such as the church in Smyrna that was, because of its patient endurance in the way of the Lamb “rich” even amidst its affliction and poverty?

Certainly some elements of American Christianity run the risk of being all too like the civil religion of the Roman Empire that blessed wars and militarism and economic exploitation of the periphery of the empire that further enriched the wealthy core.

Maybe Christianity as a religion has become so linked with empire, at least in our society, that we might look outside the organized church to find Smyrnan-like creative resistance in our day—places that cultivate suspicion of coercive power, places that embrace cooperative power, places that provide human-scale alternatives to profit-driven corporate economics.

I thought a bit about this, and came up with a few, partly whimsical, examples of ways of resistance. The alternative TV news show Democracy Now over against, say, CBS or Fox News. The Friendly City Food Co-op over against, say, Walmart or Food Lion. The Dogfish Head Brewery over against, say, Budweiser. Park View Federal Credit Union over against, say, Bank of America. The family-run Taco stand on Reservoir Street over against, say, Taco Bell. Kathleen Temple Tailor over against, say, Target. The War Resisters League over against the Pentagon.

When we Christians embrace the message of Revelation, that we “conquer” with cooperative power, not coercive power, I can see us moving in two directions at the same time. One direction is to work within the churches to call our tradition back to its biblical roots—that those who confess Jesus would seek, in his name, to embody his way of creative resistance to the ways of empire. The second direction is happily to join with all others of good will outside the churches who seek life, who find true power in joining together in myriad ways to resist, to celebrate, and to encourage. Amen.

Here is a link to all the sermons in this series.

World War II was the biggest catastrophe ever to befall humanity. Think of it like this: say a meteorite crashes into Findley and kills everyone, around 40,000 people. This would be incredible news. America’s worst ever natural disaster. But then, imagine that something like this happens every single day for five years. You can’t imagine that? Well, that’s what World War II was—40,000 people killed every single day for five years.

But World War II wasn’t a natural catastrophe—it was something human beings did to each other. These 80 million people didn’t just die due to impersonal nature run amok. They were killed by other people. World War II was an intensely moral event. Human choices. Human values. Human actions.

And World War II has cast a long shadow. We’re still in its shadow. As William Faulkner wrote, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Just one example. In Barak Obama’s acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, he alluded to the necessity for America to fight in Afghanistan—and cited the war against Hitler as one key rationale. That war was obviously a necessary war in the public mind, our nation’s “good war,” and thus it helps us see our current war as necessary as well.

Because World War II was—and is—so big and devastating and epoch shaping, it is a theological issue. But we aren’t getting a lot of theological reflection on it. I am just completing the first phase of a long-term project on responding theologically to this war.

I have not yet actually begun to address one big type of question—what does World War II tell us about God? Where do we see God in this oh-so-big event—and what about the ways in which we don’t see God?

I have begun with another type of question—stated a bit facetiously: What does God tell us about World War II? But I haven’t really gotten to the “God” part. That will be step two, to reflect on this war and its long shadow in light of my explicitly Christian and explicitly pacifist convictions.

Step one, though, is to ask the question more in terms of general and, we could say, public, convictions. What do key stated moral values in the United Stated say about World War II? Let’s start with this more general moral theology, which, I believe, gives us enough substance to begin a critical evaluation that could speak to many Americans.

The American “purpose statements”

The key moral values were stated famously on two occasions in 1941 by president Franklin D. Roosevelt. These statements were circulated widely and provide us with stable moral criteria for our reflections on the moral legacy of World War II.

In his January 1941 State of the Union address, Roosevelt outlined his famous “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech and of worship, freedom from want and from fear, the freedoms, he said, “we seek to make secure…everywhere in the world.” Then in August, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill drew up the Atlantic Charter. This agreement’s eight points articulated what came to be the Allies’ war aims after the U.S. entered the war in December. The key goals were “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and that the nations of the world would disarm once “a wider and permanent system of general security” would be established.

So, these are the moral criteria for evaluating the war—did it lead to increased freedom everywhere in the world, to political self-determination, and to disarmament?

I will address five questions concerning World War II’s moral legacy:

(1) Was the American involvement in World War II necessary? Did it have just causes? (2) Were the means Americans used to fight this war just? (3) What were the costs of this war? (4) What was the aftermath of the War? How did it impact, for example, American foreign policy and attitudes toward war and peace? (5) Have there been alternatives to achieve freedom and self-determination apart from such violence?

Was the American involvement in World War II necessary?

In traditional moral reasoning concerning warfare, two central categories shape the discussion. Were the causes just (in Latin, the jus ad bellum—just entry into war)? And were the means just (the jus in bello—just actions in war). When we ask, was this war necessary, we ask the first question, about just cause.

Many people insist that it is simply a no-brainer. These are the words of historian Eric Bergerud: “I find it almost incomprehensible that anyone would claim to discover moral ambiguity in World War II….Machiavelli…was quite right when describing a necessary war as a just war. If World War II was not necessary, no war has been.”

Others do believe there is moral complexity but conclude that the war was necessary, all things considered. Another historian, Kenneth Rose, expresses it this way: “World War II was the greatest disaster in human history, but was this a just war that Americans had to fight despite its appalling price?” Well, yes, Rose concludes. Because the Germans were perpetuating “an abomination on the human species….The dire consequences of a German victory don’t make this war ‘good,’ but they do make it just, and necessary.” For Rose, indeed this war was necessary because of what we learned about what the Nazis did. But were German atrocities actually why America entered the War? Did opposition to German abominations determine American strategy during the War? These are important and complicated questions.

In present-day conversations, Americans tend to give three main reasons for this war’s necessity. (1) To maintain our national autonomy. “If it wasn’t for this war, we’d all be speaking German now!” (2) To further democracy in the face of global tyranny and totalitarianism. (3) To save the Jews from the Nazis. What about these reasons?

Well, neither Germany nor Japan appear actually to have intended to invade and conquer the U. S. Crazy both nations may have been, but their leaders all knew such an invasion would be impossible. The incredible logistical challenge faced by the Allies in invading France in 1944 in negotiating only a few miles across the English Channel show that invading the U. S. across vast oceans simply couldn’t have been done.

Plus, neither seem to have wanted to conquer the U. S., in any case. Both wanted to dominate their own regions, not the entire world. They desired some sort of coexistence with the U.S.—and decided war was necessary only when America showed no interest in that kind of coexistence and actually actively opposed their actions.

But wasn’t the U.S. then wanting to back democracy against totalitarianism? Wasn’t that why America aided the British against the Germans and the Chinese against the Japanese? This is a complicated question. Certainly, most Americans supported democracy. But in terms of U.S. foreign policy, the picture is ambiguous. China under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek was an authoritarian dictatorship, not a democracy. Britain may have been a democracy—internally, but also ruthlessly ruled over a global empire that, at least for its non-white subjects, utterly resisted ideals of genuine self-determination.

And, during the war, the U.S. made common cause with the Soviet Union. Stalin’s empire was about as far from democracy as any major nation has ever been. The American fight against Germany furthered the reach of Soviet totalitarianism. As well, defeating the Japanese helped open the path for a Communist takeover in China.

Then there is the fate of Poland. In the 1930s, Poland was a military dictatorship. Britain allied with Poland against Germany for reasons of realpolitik, not out of a quest for democracy. Germany invading Poland trip-wired World War II and caused Britain to declare war on Germany. This war utterly devastated Poland. It led directly to 20% of the Polish population being killed. When the war ended, the Western Allies acquiesced to the annexation of Poland into the Soviet Empire and the imposition of a totalitarian Communist government. Poland was on the “winning side”—and was crushed.

What about saving the Jews? This is also complicated. General Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied supreme commander in Europe said, on the site of a newly liberated concentration camp at the end of the war, “This is why we were fighting.” But in fact, Eisenhower’s own policies during the War ignored the fate of the Jews in the Nazi death camps, even though the Allies’ leaders knew from early on at least some of what was happening. Nothing was done to stop the holocaust as it was happening.

The Allies’ position was that the best hope for the Jews was to end the war in decisive victory as soon as possible—and only then turn to liberating the camps. However, by insisting on “unconditional surrender,” the Allies prolonged the war for many months, during which time the Nazis desperately continued their killing.

So, if the U.S. involvement in World War II was not about protecting the country from invasion, not about furthering democracy in face of totalitarianism, not about rescuing Jews—was it really necessary? Why did the U.S. fight? This is a simplistic and brief answer, but let me suggest four main reasons: (1) The conflict of American imperialism with Japanese imperialism over dominance of the Far East, especially China. (2) The strong alliance the U.S. had with Britain and its non-democratic global empire. (3) Concerns on the part of American corporations that the Germans were proving after all to be a threat to their interests. (4) The growing awareness that a war would be highly economically profitable, as it proved to be beyond anyone’s wildest imagination—and that the American military could dominate the world. Would these reasons would pass muster with just war philosophy?

Were the means Americans used to fight this war just?

Now to my second question. Were the means just? Is a “necessary war” just regardless of the tactics? The moral tradition of thinking about warfare has insisted that necessity alone does not make a war just. Two key criteria in particular measure the justifiability of tactics in warfare: the criterion of proportionality (that the damage done by the tactics does not outweigh the good accomplished by their implementation) and the criterion of noncombatant immunity (wars should not be waged on civilian populations).

American military people were aware of these moral criteria concerning the waging of war. At the beginning of the European war, President Roosevelt broadcast to Western Europe a call for the belligerents not to target civilians. He feared “hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities” would be killed. Let the belligerents “determine that [their] armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities.”

By early 1942, the U.S. joined the European air war. The British were intentionally bombing population centers, and the Americans argued instead for focusing on military objects. By the summer of 1943, new American leaders were more open to civilian bombing. The British created a list of German cities to be smashed, beginning with Germany’s second largest city, Hamburg. In July, for the first time, air attackers intentionally created a firestorm that incinerated everything in its path—including tens of thousands of old people, children, and other non-combatants.

The second intentional firestorm was loosed on Dresden early in 1945—an attack immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut, a prisoner of war, witnessed the destruction of this “unfortified” city that was full of war refugees.

In the cases of both Hamburg and Dresden, Allied awareness of jus ad bellum criteria led to attempts to present the attacks as having military purposes. However, with Hamburg, which was a center for war manufacturing, the attacks actually focused on the city center. As an ironic consequence, survivors of the bombing, deprived of their normal livelihoods due to the destruction of the central city, flocked to the suburban weapons plants for work, alleviating what had up to that time been a chronic labor shortage in those plants. So, the bombing actually assisted the German war effort.

With Dresden, the only possible military-related significance of the city was its role as a transportation center. Again, the actual focus of the bombing mostly ignored the railroads. Within three days, Dresden’s transportation facilities were back in full swing and in fact large numbers of German troops and supplies passed through the city not long afterward on their way to battle to the east.

Whatever reluctance Americans had for targeting civilians was gone by the time they attacked the Japanese mainland early in 1945. The first and most destructive attack was on Tokyo, March 9. The U.S. dropped 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs. They burned Tokyo’s most densely populated districts to the ground in a ferocious firestorm that killed more than 85,000 people. Over the next five months, the Americans pursued a city-bombing campaign across Japan. Up to 900,000 people were killed and maybe 20 million rendered homeless. “The principal cause of civilian deaths,’ says the postwar US Bombing Survey, “was burns.” The commander for this campaign was General Curtis LeMay. This is what he had to say about the campaign: With our attacks, hundreds of thousands of people were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.”

It was only one more step to the attacks that obliterated any pretense of operating according to moral criteria in war tactics—the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Debate continues about the military necessity of those bombs. Regardless of their military necessity, these weapons brought immediate death to tens of thousands of noncombatants and brought lingering death to tens of thousands more in the months to come, and poisoned the genetic legacy of most who were exposed to that radiation. Their use clearly violated the jus in bello criteria.

Not only do we see during the years of World War II steady accommodation to tactics that drastically violated the criteria of proportion and noncombatant immunity, the use of these tactics had a major impact on the practice of warfare for the United States in the years following. I’ll offer just one example. During the entire course of World War II, with the kind of devastating consequences I have alluded to, the United States and Britain dropped about 3.4 million tons of bombs on Germany and Japan. Twenty years later, during the Vietnam War, the U.S. dropped 6.7 million tons of bombs on Indochina.

British philosopher A.C. Grayling’s careful consideration of the evidence in his book Among the Dead Cities concludes that the Allied bombing of Germany during World War II constituted a war crime. Former American Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who worked during World War II analyzing targets for the American air war, stated not long before his death that the firebombing of Tokyo was also a war crime.

Is any war requiring war crimes ever “necessary.”…

What were the costs of this war?

What were the costs of this war. This is my third question. Actually determining the “cost” of World War II is, of course, an impossible task. However, if we are to conclude that the good the war achieved in some genuine sense surpasses its cost, we must have some sense of what that cost was. It’s too easy to say, hey, we won, so it was worth it. An approach based on moral criteria has actually to weigh the costs before determining “it was worth it.”

We may start with the number of deaths. Of the major belligerents in the War, the United States suffered by far the fewest. Even so, over 400,000 Americans died. Great Britain lost about 450,000 (proportionately about three times more than the U.S.) and the Soviet Union perhaps as many as 26 million (65 times more than the U.S.). Of the Axis powers, Germany lost as many as 10 million lives and Japan close to 3 million. (It is interesting to note that four out of every five German soldiers who died, lost their lives in the battles with the Soviets on the eastern front.)

Some of the nations caught in the crossfire sustained casualties greater than most of the belligerents—most notably Poland (5.8 million), China (20 million), the Philippines and Yugoslovia (1 million each), French Indochina [Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos] (1.5 million), India (2.6 million), and the Dutch East Indies [Indonesia] (4 million). Perhaps 80 million died in all.

On top of the direct deaths, we must note the tens of millions of people injured, driven from their homes, and who suffered disease or hunger. Plus the incalculable weight of grief and other emotional traumas. On top of the human casualties, we must also note the deaths of domestic and wild animals plus the immense damage done to the physical environment. I am aware of no estimates of these costs.

One notable fact about the death toll of World War II is the astounding number of non-fighting civilians who lost their lives. Eighty percent of the deaths caused by the War were noncombatants. Perhaps one reason Americans can call this a “good war” is that only 1,700 American noncombatants were killed. A high percentage of deaths came to people who lived in nations who were not partisans in the conflict. For example, the number of British, American, and Japanese war deaths combined were fewer the war deaths suffered by Indonesians. India suffered six times the deaths that Great Britain did. Was the alleged good that resulted from this war possibly worth their deaths? How would this be answered from God’s perspective?

Let me very briefly touch on three other costs of this war. The Holocaust was an atrocity totally to be lain at the murderous feet of the Nazis. However, the war itself made the Holocaust possible. This is the conclusion of Holocaust historian Doris Bergen: “War…exponentially increased the numbers and kinds of victims….War provided killers with both a cover and an excuse for murder; in wartime, killing was normalized, and extreme, even genocidal measures could be justified with familiar arguments about the need to defend the homeland. Without the war, the Holocaust would not—and could not—have happened.” Bergen’s assertion cannot be proved—but she reminds us that violent means generally tend to increase the situation’s violence.

Then there was the spread of Communist totalitarianism in Central and Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia. We cannot imagine the creation of the Warsaw Pact and the “Iron Curtain” except for World War II. The U.S. supposedly went to war for the sake of democracy and disarmament. As far as Central and Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia were concerned, in relation to these purposes, the War was an abject failure.

Another cost may be seen in the war’s impact on American democracy. President Roosevelt, in his quest to move the country in the direction he desired, often ignored the will of the people and their congressional leaders. He subverted democracy, engaging ever more in clandestine behavior and public misrepresentation of the facts.

Americans, prior to World War II, would enter a war, mobilize, and then at war’s end demobilize and return to a civilian-centered, more democratic political economy. Not this time. Directly linked with Roosevelt’s desire for more unhindered power, American military leaders desired to leave behind the limits to military power that had characterized the U.S. in the 1930s. Due to key unilateral presidential actions that did not pass through the legislative process, and without informing the public, the United States moved from a democracy to a “national security state”—and stayed there.

A key step was the construction of the Pentagon, which expanded to become the true center of power in the U.S. government. The centralization and tremendous growth of military power in the United States were central costs of the War.

Another key structure of militarism was the nuclear weapons program. It absorbed enormous amounts of resources—all hidden from Congressional scrutiny. This program was so top secret that Vice President Harry Truman knew nothing of it until after Roosevelt’s death when he became president. Truman then made his secret decision to drop two nuclear bombs on Japan with no input from Congress. The decisions to expand the American nuclear arsenal and to share nuclear capabilities with various countries have all been made outside of democratic processes.

In the late 1930s, the U.S. had a relatively small military. The president felt constrained by the Constitution and democratic accountability to rely on a formal declaration of war by Congress before committing American forces to war. By the end of the War in 1945, both of these elements of American politics were gone forever—o more small military, no more waiting for a Congressional war declaration.

What was the aftermath of the War?

In understanding World War II’s moral legacy, we need to ask not only about the 1940s but also the long-term impact of that war. This is our fourth question. How has the U.S. has related to the rest of the world since 1945? We may call this legacy the War’s “long shadow”.

At the end of the War, the U.S. stood as the world’s dominant power economically and militarily. The American political system had unmatched prestige in the world. More than any other time in American history, the nation was in a position to move the world toward the stated ideals the war effort was based on—self-determination, disarmament, genuine democracy.

The U.S. also had a monopoly on the most powerful weapon the world had ever seen. In the months after August 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson advocated that America treat its nuclear capability as a kind of global trust. The U.S. should ask the Soviets and the British to join them and have joint stewardship over this new mega-weapon. In the end, those who wanted to expand the American nuclear arsenal and retain their monopoly defeated this proposal. We can only imagine our world now if Stimson had carried the day.

Up until 1947, the U.S. had a War Department. This name implied a role that would to come into prominence only in the rare instances where America found itself at war. After 1947, it was the Defense Department, with ever-expanding prominence. The country always needs to pour major resources into defense. So, World War II bled into the Cold War, the Cold War bled into the War on Terror, never-ending war footing fueled by war-oriented agencies permanently expanded by World War II: the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the nuclear weapons program.

In 1947, President Truman announced what came to be known as the “Truman Doctrine.” This doctrine locked America into an adversarial path in relating to the Soviet Union. It said, in effect: Anywhere in the world where Communism arises, it constitutes a direct threat to the security of the United States and must be met with force. This doctrine led to interventions against many peoples’ efforts at self-determination worldwide, since many such efforts would be labeled “communist.” The past 65 years are a litany of one Truman Doctrine-inspired intervention after another.

Soon, the doctrine was invoked to justify massive military engagement in faraway Korea, in which about 4 million Koreans lost their lives; 75% of whom were non-combatants. Many military interventions were more covert—such as secretly overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. Both interventions led to decades of violent, authoritarian, anti-democratic governments.

Another intervention begun in the 1950s ultimately became the greatest American foreign policy disaster ever—the war in Vietnam. Throughout the 1960s, the U.S. expanded its military role. This war brought down both President Johnson and President Nixon. It resulted in 50,000 American deaths and millions of deaths in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Finally in 1975, the Vietnamese drove the U.S. out.

The 1970s and 1980s saw massive American-generated violence in the Western Hemisphere, from the CIA-engineered coup in Chile to the U.S.-sponsored Contra War in Nicaragua; all justified by Truman Doctrine logic.

However, in the late 1980s, came an unexpected turn. Due in large part to the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union more or less unilaterally withdrew from the Cold War. Though it wasn’t Gorbachev’s initial intention, he actually in the end presided over the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire.

With Gorbachev taking the Soviets out of the Cold War, the U.S. emerged again as the world’s one superpower. As in 1945, the U.S. stood in a position to exert immense influence in moving the world toward genuine peace. And, as in 1945, the actual choices of American policy makers moved the world in the opposite direction.

The moment that focused these choices came in the summer of 1990. Many hoped for the dawning of a new era. One symbol of this hope was the clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This clock, using minutes to the midnight of nuclear war, measured the world’s danger. When the clock was first created, in the late 1940s, it showed just six minutes until midnight. It got as close as two minutes. But in 1990, it showed seventeen minutes until midnight.

Even though the George H. W. Bush Administration supported militarism, they faced increasing pressure to draw down. And they seemed to relent. However, just days after major American military cuts were announced, Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, who had operated for years with American support, invaded Kuwait. This problem could have been resolved diplomatically. But Saddam’s move presented the war forces with an opportunity not to be missed. Early in 1991 the Gulf War erupted, resulting in a great victory for the U.S. military—especially in reversing the movement toward disarmament.

Ten years later, the attacks of September 11, 2001 provided more opportunities for the forces of militarization to expand their power, to the point that about a year and a half later they could lead the U.S. into a war of naked aggression on Iraq.

So, back to the moral legacy of World War II. That war permanently enhanced American militarism. It led directly to the creation of new, extraordinarily powerful structures devoted to sustained dependence on force: the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the nuclear weapons regime. Most recently, President Obama, elected as a peace candidate, has expanded military spending, even in face of huge budget deficits and a general economic crisis.

In a nutshell, we may characterize the impact of World War II on America’s way of being in the world this way: it powerfully pushed U.S. policy-makers to view problems that arise in international affairs as problems to be solved mainly through the projection of force. Military might worked well in the 1940s—and that success seems to justify trying the same kind of approach over and over….

I suggest the most elementary step in a theological response to World War II is to say we apply stable or objective values in assessing that event. We assume that these values apply to our side as well as the other actors. When we do this, we come up with a result that is disconcerting for Americans. The war effort violated the Americans’ stated values and aims, and it violated the generally accepted values of the just war tradition—not only the values of pacifists.

The U.S. war effort transformed the nation—and made the stated war aims of political self-determination and disarmament “everywhere in the world” impossible to attain. To come to such a conclusion, though, is not mainly about passing judgment on the past. What is done is done, after all. But this negative conclusion about World War II challenges today’s assumptions that this was a just or necessary war that in some powerful sense validates our present wars and preparations for war.

Have there been alternatives to achieve freedom and self-determination apart from such violence?

Still, if we reflect theologically on World War II’s damaging legacy, probably our key step will be to challenge negative fatalism. We do not live in a closed, iron-cage like universe. So, as we look at World War II, we also ask for signs of life.

It’s true, the story evokes an image I learned from my friend, Andy Schmookler. This image is what Andy calls the parable of the tribes. Imagine several tribes living as neighbors. Then one tribe wants what another has and takes it by force. The attacked tribe has two options, both tragic: fight back and be like the attacking tribe or flee and allow the attacking tribe to get what it wants. In either case, violence wins. This initial attack, Andy says, sets off a dynamic in social evolution that leads to a continual victory for violence and force, and becomes the ever-expanding dynamic of human social life.

So, we have an ever-growing momentum toward un-freedom, coercion, and  toward the abyss. Well, I want briefly to mention a theme that counters the fatalism and despair of this story. My fifth question: Is there a counter-narrative, an alternative story to the story of American militarization? Yes, an alternative does exist side-by-side with the war story over the past seventy years. While clearly the alternative story is tiny and marginal compared to the dominant story, it does provide a basis, when seen with eyes of faith, for possibilities for what visionary David Korten calls “the great turning.”

The alternative story has roots in World War II as well. It is, you could say, the minority report on the moral legacy of that war. Some 16 million Americans served in the military during this war—and about 18,000 formally refused to serve (that includes 12,000 who performed legally accepted alternative service and 6,000 who went to prison as draft resisters). So, for every potential soldier who said no to participation in this war, nearly one thousand said yes.

However, this tiny group of objectors provided the spark, provided inspiration, and certainly provided people power for the emergence of important efforts to construct a different kind of legacy than ever-expanding militarization and unending violence, a different vision of politics, methods of seeking self-determination and disarmament directly, rather than indirectly through the state’s coercive force. The key starting point that unites all who take part in the counter-narrative is simply to refuse to consent to the warring state—in the 1940s and ever since.

There were two distinct tendencies among most of the objectors: those with predominantly “servant tendencies” who focused more on works of service to address hurting people’s needs and those with “transformer tendencies” who focused more on social change. These tendencies may be seen in two different types of activity in the postwar years—though they complement each other and many have embodied elements of both. The transformer tendencies, for example, may be seen in direct action for social change such as civil rights and peace movements.

Examples of servant emphases may be seen in relief, development, and witness efforts of several organizations that emerged from World War II primed for peace work in a severely damaged world. Three “servant” groups are American Friends Service Committee, Mennonite Central Committee, and the Catholic Worker. Different from each other in many ways, they nonetheless share an emphasis on caring for people in need, a grounding in faith traditions and communities, and a desire to impact the surrounding world in ways that remain consistent with their core nonviolence-centered values.

These two peacemaking streams, the servants and the transformers, have contributed in major ways to the emergence of a tremendous amount of ferment around the world—the possibilities of people power, the world’s other superpower, the civil society movement, a force more powerful, world and local social forums. These movements have created possibilities for a different kind of story, a different kind of moral legacy that could yet emerge from the rubble of World War II.

In conclusion, let me mention the book of Revelation. Chapter 13 gives us as vivid an image of the spiritual power behind World War II and the momentum towards the abyss as we could ask for: “A beast rising out of the sea” with heads, and horns, and crowns, the epitome of militarist violence. “Who is like the beast, and who can stand against it?” Indeed, as we look at the last seventy years of American foreign policy from the perspective of peace, we can’t help but join in this question. “All the inhabitants of the earth will worship it”—the power of the sword reigns supreme.

But Revelation 14 then shows a counter-vision. “I looked, and there was the Lamb!” The imagery here is complicated, but I believe we are being shown, standing with the Lamb, multitudes from all nations who trust in his way instead of the Beast’s. These are the ones who follow the Lamb wherever he goes, even in the face of the mighty power of the Beast. They are the ones who trust in “the force more powerful,” the force of love and compassion, of human solidarity and the rejection of weapons of war.

Those who said no to the “good war,” small as their number may have been, witnessed to this force more powerful. We see this force emerge even in the face of the seemingly all-powerful story of redemptive violence that is generally taken to be World War II’s moral legacy. This other moral legacy, one of genuine peace, can become history’s final verdict on those terrible events that marked the twentieth-century.

Here is a link to the longer work which this lecture is based on: The Long Shadow: World War II’s Moral Legacy

Recommended Reading

Nicholson Baker. Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Simon and Schuster, 2007.

Michael Bess. Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II. Knopf, 2006.

Patrick Buchanan. Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. Crown, 2008.

James Carroll. House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Norman Davies. No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945. Penguin, 2006.

John Dower. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. Pantheon, 1986.

A. C. Grayling. Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. Walker, 2006.

William Hitchcock. The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe. Free Press, 2008.

Kenneth Rose. Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II. Routledge, 2008.

Jonathan Schell. The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. Metropolitan, 2003.

Tim Weiner. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Anchor, 2008.

Introductory thoughts

Most scholars place the writing of Revelation in the final decade of the first century, during the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Despite ancient traditions that have linked the “John” of Revelation with John the Apostle, the recent consensus has concluded that Revelation’s John is almost surely an otherwise unknown preacher/prophet. Since this John thus has little authorial authority, our estimation of his skill and insight must be based totally on the contents of the book itself.

Not only our estimation of John’s authority, but also our sense of the broader context of the book pretty much completely rests on references within the book itself. So we will need to be attentive to those references as we go along.

The other standard issue of introduction has more to do with hermeneutics. How are we to read Revelation? What do we expect to find herein? Should we mine Revelation for predictions concerning future events? Should, instead, we mainly look at Revelation as an important historical source for first-century apocalypticism? Or, as a third option, should we engage Revelation as “churchly” literatures, writings born out of faith and speaking with continuing relevance to people of similar convictions concerning Jesus’ lordship and Christians’ call to follow his way in a traumatic world?

Again, how we answer these expectations questions will be determined as we move along and consider the contents of the book.

1:1-8—Introduction and Salutation

The first few words of the book already puts the cards on the table in relation to our reading strategy of Revelation. We can think of three distinct options that highlight different terms and motifs at the beginning—and that as a consequence of their distinctive emphases go on to read the book as a whole in significantly divergent ways.

One stand picks up on the first word, “Revelation.” The Greek is Apocalypsie, the source for our word “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic.” This emphasis places the priority on Revelation as apocalyptic writing, part of a distinctive genre of literature that flourished in the ancient near east in the generations prior to and following after Jesus’ time. In this approach, Revelation is read first of all in relation to other apocalyptic literature, with an emphasis placed on its distinctiveness among the biblical writings.

A second strand emphasizes the phrase, “to show his servants what must soon take place.” For those with this emphasis, Revelation is read first of all as predictive literature, providing insights into future events.

A third approach, characteristic of this study, places the emphasis on the second and third words of the book, “Jesus Christ.” Revelation may (I would say, should) be read in the context of the New Testament and broader biblical story of salvation that culminates in the life and teaching of Jesus.

When we place the priority of the “Jesus Christ” emphasis, and decide to read this reference to Jesus Christ as a signal that this book is self-consciously placing itself within the Gospel story of Jesus’ disclosure of God among human beings, we will assume Revelation is best read in continuity with Jesus’ message.

The linking of “revelation” (apocalypse) with Jesus Christ leads us to a more mundane understanding of this term. As an “apocalypse,” what follows intends to provide insight and clarity into the meaning of Jesus’ life, teaching, death, and resurrection. We are talking here about “revelation” as illumination and insight, not as future predictions or as esoteric visions meant to provide otherwise unavailable information concerning catastrophic judgment and the ending of history.

“What must soon take place,” then, serves to alert John’s readers that the visions to follow speak directly to their reality—with prophetic insight. “What must soon take place” does not signal literal predictions of the future. As with ancient Israel’s prophets, this phrase means a call to attentiveness. Be aware and listen to John’s message about the meaning of life, especially meaning of what God has shown the world in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

God is the source of this “revelation.” God gave the revelation to Jesus to show Jesus’ followers (“servants”), which could be read as an inclusive population—all who seek to follow Jesus throughout time and geography. We will see that this book has a specific context; however, in speaking directly to that context God reveals the reality of Jesus’ message in a way that speaks to all who would follow Jesus.

God makes this revelation known to Jesus’ followers through two mediators. God uses God’s “angel” (which should understand as a “messenger” about whom we know nothing else, the point being simply that God uses this messenger to convey the revelation to John; we are given no sense that this “messenger” has agency). All we know about the human recipient and mediator of this revelation is that his name is “John,” he is God’s “servant” too, and he shares with Jesus and Jesus’ servants the experience of persecution (1:9).

With both the angel and with John, the role is simply to be channels for the revelation. Neither plays an active role in generating or interpreting the message conveyed in the revelation.

Though the reference here speaks of John testifying (both of “the word of God” and “testimony of Jesus”—presumably two allusions to one basic message, one of a number places where Revelation links Jesus and God closely together; here clearly the close connection specifically has to do with unity in the message of Jesus with the will of God more than the metaphysical unity of later christological dogma) “to all that he saw,” we will find as the visions unfold that they do not actually give literal pictures but are more “literary” visions that are impossible to imagine visually. So, what John “saw” actually refers more to what he read, heard, and imagined than to literal sight.

The blessing the book begins with goes to those who “read aloud” and “hear” the words of the “prophecy.” That is, this book is meant to be heard, and heard as we will learn by the entire church of Jesus Christ. What will be heard are words of “prophecy.” If we read Revelation in the context of the rest of the Bible, we will be inclined to understand “prophecy” in line with earlier prophets such as Amos, Jeremiah, and John the Baptist. That is, biblical prophecy speaks to present faithfulness. It is very different than predictive sooth-saying, which is condemned many times.

“For the time is near” (1:3) echoes “what must soon take place” in calling for attention from the readers and listeners. It should not be understood as a futuristic prediction about the soon end of history, but rather as a call to be aware of the presence of the kingdom of God and its demands in the world right now. This ethical sense is reinforced with the promise of blessing to those who “keep what is written” in the prophecy. Keeping what is written matters because, as Jesus taught, the kingdom of God is at hand, present among us, demanding our allegiance over against human kingdoms.

After this preface identifying this book as a “revelation” and a “prophecy” given by God through an angel to “John,” John himself enters the picture as the author of what is to follow. John addresses the prophecy to “the seven churches that are in Asia” (1:4). He packages what follows as a letter to those seven churches. We are likely meant to understand “the seven churches” in two senses. These clearly are seven actual churches in the Roman province of “Asia Minor” in the northeast section of the Mediterranean region. We will learn in chapters two and three more about these congregations, enough to realize that John means to speak to real people in real churches facing real issues. At the same time that we recognize the need to keep the actual context for this prophecy always in mind, we also are encouraged to think in broader terms as well.

Clearly, that there are seven churches spoken of (and portrayed in chapters two and three) has significance. We know that numerous other congregations existed in the area of the seven that are mentioned. So John has something in mind in only addressing seven. From the use of this number elsewhere in Revelation, we can be pretty confident that at least part of what John had in mind was that in addressing these seven churches, he is also addressing the church more broadly. The number seven here encourages us to read Revelation in anticipation of broader application of what is contained here than would be relevant only to the specific churches mentions.

Like with much of the rest of the Bible, we do well to place close attention to the contextual clues we may find in the book in our efforts to interpret and apply its message. We should be assuming that John has particular issues in mind that connect with the needs of the seven churches he consciously addressed. However, with the intentional limiting of the message to seven churches (seven being the number for completeness), John also aims his message at the broader church.

John again links God and Jesus closely together. This time, he also adds an allusion to the Holy Spirit in what is, at least in a loose sense, a clearly Trinitarian allusion (1:4-5). John offers salutation to these churches from God (“him who is and who was and who is to come”), the Holy Spirit (“the seven spirits who are before his throne”), and Jesus Christ (“the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth”). The key point here also seems to be the oneness of the message, the unity of these three sources of grace and peace.

For what follows, since this book is a “revelation of Jesus Christ,” the description of Jesus here merits close attention. “The faithful witness” refers to his life of persevering love culminating in his execution at the hands of the Roman Empire. “Witness” translates the Greek word martys (“martyr”) making a clear connection between Jesus’ life and his death. While Revelation emphasizes throughout both Jesus’ close link with God and Jesus’ exalted status, these elements of Jesus’ identity remain inextricably linked with his life of vulnerable, persevering love. His faithfulness to the point of martyrdom provided the bases for his exaltation.

“The firstborn of the dead” refers to how God vindicated Jesus’ faithfulness by raising him from the dead following his execution. The term “firstborn” implies that others are to follow. Later, Revelation makes clear that the promise of vindication through resurrection is also made to all those who “follow the Lamb wherever he goes.” Just as Jesus as faithful martyr merits vindication, so too with his followers. The link is clear: the resurrection and the faithfulness go together. This reality of vindication underscores the book’s optimism that those who follow the Lamb are on the winning side of history, even if for the present they suffer.

The phrase “the ruler of the kings of the earth” at this point emphasizes a paradox. The martyr is ruler! How can this be? The meaning of this description will only be ascertained as we study the rest of Revelation. At this point, we may note that John makes extraordinary claims about Jesus’ ultimate power, his role in the social and political events of the world, and the nature of the world’s rulers.

When held together, this threefold pattern of Jesus sets the stage for the revelation of Jesus Christ that is to come in this book. We will see more of how Jesus’ life led to his martyrdom, of how God vindicated this life, and the relevance of these acts of Jesus and God for the politics of the world.

John continues in his salutation to the churches by elaborating more on the meaning of this Jesus Christ he has brought before us. Jesus loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood (1:5b). All three components of this sentence must be held together: Jesus’ love, Jesus acts of providing for freedom, and the role of Jesus’ “blood” in this freeing.

The love stems from the love of the Creator for the creation, even in its brokenness and alienation. The underlying motivation for God that fuels “what must soon take place” is God’s love. We have only a few markers in the course of Revelation to remind of this fundamental reality, so it is important to take note of John’s beginning emphasis here.

The work of love that Jesus embodies has as its goal the setting free of enslaved creation, especially of enslaved humanity. The visions that follow will drive home in powerful ways the identity of the agents and the consequences of this enslavement. John emphasizes clearly right away that everything Jesus does as God’s agent in our world stems from love and has as its purpose the freeing of humanity from all that enslaves us. The “sins” that are mentioned here are likely a general reality more than any particular acts. The fundamental sin in the Bible is idolatry, trusting in things rather than in God. The consequence of idolatry is enslavement, wherein the idol seduces and controls the idolater.

Freedom from the control of sin, from enslavement to the principalities and powers that seduce humanity into idolatry, comes through Jesus “blood.” As with elsewhere in the Bible, the term “blood” is used without explanation of what precisely is meant by the term. In the context of the rest of the Bible and of what is to come in Revelation, we may hypothesize for now that by “blood” John has in mind the overall life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That is, it is not Jesus’ literal blood that frees but what the blood symbolizes—Jesus’ life of freedom from the powers and idolatry and sin, lived to the end in faithfulness even in face of violence and the most devastating kind of execution. God’s vindication in making Jesus “first born of the dead” reveals to the cosmos that God’s love survives the worst blood-letting that the powers are capable of.

The freedom Jesus provides is certain a “freedom from”: freedom from the powers and from idolatry and from sin, all the aspects of life that lead to enslavement. However, Jesus’ freedom is even more a “freedom for.” Jesus frees those who follow him so that they might be “a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father” (1:6). We must remember that “kingdom” is a political term, spoken of here in the present tense. The freedom-for is a freedom here and now to live as communities that embody the way of the Lamb and display to the cosmos that Jesus indeed is the ruler of the kings of the earth.

What follows in Revelation will be visions directly concerned with a struggle between two present and demanding kingdoms. The Roman Empire is a “kingdom,” too. When John speaks of Jesus “making us a kingdom” he means to say that followers of Jesus have chosen to enter his kingdom and, in a genuine sense, to exit Rome’s kingdom. The book will conclude with a clear juxtaposition of this choice, one of the fundamental choices energizing John’s visions. Babylon or New Jerusalem? These are the two rival kingdoms. John’s burden is to present those in the churches with a much thicker sense of the realities and demands of God’s kingdom. Those who are the “priests” who serve Jesus’ God do so through their embodied love and their resistance to the loyalty demanded by the kingdom that directly competes with God’s.

The implications with the “priest” reference link with the earlier reference to Jesus as ruler of the “kings of the earth.” Though Revelation portrays the Lamb demanding a high level of commitment from his followers, reflecting the loyalty demanded of citizens of the Lamb’s kingdom, the purposes of this commitment include the responsibility to witness to the kings of the earth and contribute to their transformation. As we follow the references of the “kings of the earth” throughout the book, we will see that for all is polarities and extreme drama, Revelation means to convey the reality of a social transformation, where the glory of the nations enters New Jerusalem and contributes to the worship of God and the Lamb. The witness of John’s readers will play a major role in this transformation.

John follows his doxology with a proclamation. Jesus is “coming with the clouds” (1:7). This alludes to Daniel 7:13-14: “I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven….To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.”

From Daniel, we have a reference to the “son of man” becoming king of all nations. This vision clearly fits well with John’s comments here, more as a reiteration of John’s points than adding any new content. We will learn from the rest of the book the nature of the “kingship” of John’s “Son of Man” (the term Jesus uses of himself in the Gospels).

The actual “coming in the clouds” with Jesus is not a literal return so much as a rhetorical device emphasizing the universality and inevitability of Jesus’ way of ruling as the engine that ultimately drives history to its healing conclusion. “Every eye will see him,” as well, rhetorically emphasizes the universality of Jesus’ message. We will have to complete to book to get a clear sense of in what sense “those who pierced him” will see him—and in what sense “all the tribes of the earth will wail” (1:7). For now, we may remind ourselves to hold on tight to the opening words: this is a “revelation” of Jesus Christ. We have already heard the first of several “revelations” of Jesus as the “faithful martyr,” and his practice of love and freedom giving has been proclaimed.

The affirmation of God as “Alpha and Omega” joins with several other images scattered throughout the book that highlight God’s universality and ultimate supremacy. If we hold on tight to the close connection John confesses between God and the Lamb, and the confession of God’s love, we will see these images of God’s supremacy as reminders that the ultimate and victorious power of the universe is the power of persevering love.

1:9-20—A Vision of Christ

John gives us as much information about himself in 1:9 as he will in the book. He calls himself the “brother” of the people in the “seven churches that in Asia” (1:4). By calling himself their “brother,” John implies that he does not have a formal role in relation to these congregations but is more their peer. He does make it clear in the book that he does see himself as a “prophet” (see especially chapter ten when he imitates Ezekiel by eating the “little scroll”). However, his authority in writing this book is based on the vision he is conveying, not on his personal status.

He shares with his readers “in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance,” terms that evoke the earlier pattern of Jesus (faithful witness, first-born of the death, ruler of the kings of the earth). As evidence, John mentions that he is “on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (1:9). About the significance of Patmos no more is known than about John’s identity itself. Traditionally, Patmos has been seen as a prison island, but we have no direct evidence that that was the case. It certainly makes sense that John did suffer the fate of being imprisoned due to his witness to Jesus, but that must remain an inference at the most.

The opening vision begins with “a loud voice like a trumpet” that commissions John to write what he sees. In this way, John makes it clear that he presents these visions as God’s initiative, not simply his own imaginative creation. John is describe these visions “in a book” and to send the book “to the seven churches….” (1:11). We again may see in this list of churches both a particular context (more on that in chapters two and three) and a sense of John’s visions speaking to all churches (the significance of the number “seven”).

In 1:11-12 we have the first of several cases where John first hears a message then looks to see what the message involves. The contrast between the hearing and seeing will be much more important in chapters five and seven. Here, the main contrast seems to be between hearing “churches” and seeing “lampstands.”

Amidst the lampstands John sees a vision of a person he clearly understands to be the Jesus he has already mentioned as the content of the “revelation” this book witnesses to. This is the first of a number of visions, all part of the one “revelation of Jesus Christ.” The description of Jesus draws on a wealth of biblical images. In interpreting this vision and all the ones to follow, we best seek to hold together the original content of the biblical images with the distinctive picture being created by the allusions to those images in this book.

John is not a slave to his sources. In fact, even with his extraordinarily various allusions to scripture (surely reflecting deep knowledge), John rarely if ever directly quotes from the Bible. What we have is a new creation of imagery drawing creatively on remembered old images but with new purpose in some sense free from the original references(what British theologian Austin Farrer famously called “a rebirth of images”). John is not writing a research paper with an open Bible before him; rather, he “sees” and “hears” this revelation of Jesus Christ and finds himself drawing on the store of images he had internalized over his years of reading the Bible.

Johns sees “one like the Son of Man” (1:13), evoking both Daniel’s vision and the self-identification Jesus used in the Gospels. That Daniel’s vision might especially have been in mind is supported by a second use of this term in Revelation 14:14 in a judgment scene. However, John clearly does have Jesus in mind here, so the Gospel allusion must also be kept in mind.

The key point John makes here is Jesus’ presence with the churches—a presence we will learn would have had both comforting and confrontive connotations for the seven congregations. The imagery of the golden lampstands evokes the golden menorahs that burn continually before God in ancient Israel’s sanctuary (Ex 27:20-21; Lev 24:2-4). This image underscores how seriously God takes the vocation of these (and all other) Christian congregations.

The general sense of the description of Jesus here emphasizes his majesty, power, and might. In fact, the image of him with “head and hair…white as white wool, white as snow” evokes the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7:9. This is another of many places where Jesus’ close identification with God (“the one on the throne”) is emphasized.

However, we should take care not to overemphasize the one side of the human/divine, faithful witness/exalted ruler dynamic. John certainly sees Jesus as identified with the One on the Throne. However, in the end, we will see that this identification should inform our sense of the One on the Throne as least as much as our sense of Jesus. This is why we need to take seriously the connotation with the “Son of Man” metaphor of Jesus’ own earthly life and his emphasis in his own teaching on his humanity. The statement by this character here that he “was dead” (1:18), especially in the context of the link throughout the book between Jesus’ faithful life of persevering love, points us to the life that Jesus lived that led directly to his persecution and execution by the very same forces who will bedevil the followers of the Lamb throughout Revelation.

This “one like the Son of Man” has a “sharp, two-edged sword” coming from his mouth (1:16). This image draws on biblical references to the word of God and to God’s judgment (Isa 49:2; Wis 18:15-16; 2 Thes 2:8; Heb 4:12). As with the message of Jesus throughout Revelation, here we should think of prophetic words that convey the truth of God, truth both comforting and terrible depending upon prepared one is to hear them. It is crucial to recognize that this “sword” is the main weapon Jesus wields in this book (see also 2:12,16; 19:15). It is clearly a “weapon” of proclamation, not a literal sword. We will see that Jesus himself wielded this weapon most decisively in facing death in unalterable witness to God’s love—this is how he “conquered” the powers of evil; this is how his blood set people free (1:5).

John responds to this “Son of Man” by falling prostrate at his feet. Jesus’ response is a kind of call to resurrection: “Do not be afraid” (1:17); get up and “write what you have seen” (1:19). Jesus commissions John to service based on the reality that “I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (1:18). God’s vindication of Jesus’ faithfulness provides the basis for faithful discipleship with its implicit promise that God will likewise vindicate John and his readers. And, crucially for what comes, Jesus holds power over Death and Hades (and all those Powers serving Death and Hades) before the rest of the book’s visions are seen.

John sees “seven stars” being held by Jesus. Jesus tells him that the “seven stars” symbolize “the angels of the seven churches” (1:20). More than being specific beings with their own separate existence, we probably better understand the reference to the “angels” as a way of talking about each church’s inner, spiritual reality. Jesus will address the “angels” of each of the seven churches in chapters two and three in a way that makes it clear that he speaks to each church’s essence. The congregations each have an existence of their own as a collective of their members, reflecting not only the group personality but also the social context of the congregations in how each congregation in some sense is deeply shaped by the cities and broader environment of which they are part. When Jesus speaks to the “angels,” then, the point is not that we have discrete personal beings who mediate Jesus’ message. Rather, it is that Jesus is speaking directly to the heart and soul of each congregation.

Ted Grimsrud

Revelation 1:1-20—Shalom Mennonite Congregation—October 16, 2011

I had kind of a disorienting thought the other day. When I graduated from high school my dad was 55 years old. To me he was a rock, wise, competent, sure-footed. And old. A newspaper article from this time called him a “grizzled veteran coach.”

Here’s the disorienting thought. I am now two years older than my dad was then….I don’t feel grizzled, and I feel like I barely know what to do. My dad seemed to know exactly what to do; I never saw him struggle with any choices or uncertainties. Usually, it seems like I just guess and hope for the best when it comes to important decisions—you know, major home repair issues or whether to try to go to Africa to see the grandkids or important medical decisions. So often, I don’t know what to do.

So, that makes me think that maybe even my dad was not as certain and invulnerable as he seemed to me. Sometimes maybe he was just guessing and hoping for the best too.

And then that thought underscores to me that maybe in general our wisdom is pretty limited. Our choices are fallible and imperfect. We do the best we can, but there is so much we don’t know, so much we don’t understand, so little we can be certain of. We rarely know for sure the right thing to do. I think back 16 years ago—would we stay in South Dakota where we had had two great years? Or would we move to Bluffton, Ohio, or to Harrisonburg, where I could become a college teacher? We did just guess!

So maybe it’s a good idea to cultivate our humility and tentativeness and forbearance toward others. We all do try, but we are all limited—and I am just as capable of making an idiotic choice as my neighbor.

It strikes me that theology and Christian beliefs and ethical stances are all like this in relation to choices too—choices mostly made at least somewhat in the dark, choices mostly that are really just our best guesses. The idea of religious certainty and being dogmatic about certain “absolutes” to the point of violence seems highly problematic.

But still, the Yogi Berra imperative remains: When you come to a fork in the road, take it. We must still move ahead, we must make choices (imperfect as they surely will be). Ever since I became an addict of the early video game Tetris about twenty years ago I have thought of life as being like a constant Tetris game. Our choices are like Tetris pieces falling down on us; we do have to act, to choose, or else we will get completely snowed under.

So, when we pick up the Bible, we must start making choices right away. What to read. How to read it. How to apply it. And certainly this is the case should we make our way to the end of the Bible and read the book of Revelation.

Is Revelation mainly predictions about the future or exhortation for first century believers? Is it better read in relation to other, non-biblical writings in the so-called apocalyptic genre or read in relation to the New Testament? Are the plagues in Revelation from God or from the Beast?

Our first choice: Is this a revelation from or about Jesus?

Maybe the most important choice comes right away. When the first words of the book tell us this is a “revelation of Jesus Christ” do they mean a revelation from Jesus or a revelation about Jesus? Either reading is totally possible. Maybe we should see both as being intended, at least to some degree. But I think we still have to choose which meaning to emphasize more, the Greek words themselves don’t tell us. But our choice will be important.

To emphasize more “a revelation from Jesus” may set a tone of distance between Jesus and the visions that follow. This distance makes it easier to see Jesus as describing terrible judgment that God visits upon the earth—and Revelation as a fear-inducing book.

To emphasize more “a revelation about Jesus” may lead to seeing Jesus as more directly involved in the visions; they reveal Jesus, not what Jesus describes. Which then leads to another choice: If this is a revelation about Jesus, does Revelation show us Jesus-as-judge, one who comes as a violent conqueror? Or does Revelation show us Jesus-as-servant, one who brings healing through compassion?

This is my choice (my best guess that I make hoping for the best): This book is most of all a revelation about Jesus that gives a vision of how compassion might work in our car wreck of a world. Such a choice of how to read Revelation will, I believe, open our imaginations to find in the wild and wooly visions of Revelation help for our healing work. That is what I will try to show in these sermons as we work through Revelation.

Revelation One

So let’s start with chapter one, which actually turns out to be full of imagery related to Jesus. Let me read it to you now. As I read, try to notice what we are told about Jesus here. Then we can talk about it a bit.

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show God’s servants what must soon take place; God sent an angel to John, who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, in all that he saw.

John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loved us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

I, John, your brother who shares with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, “Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches.”

Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force.

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this. As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.

So, what does this chapter tell us about Jesus?…

Jesus is very, very powerful

If I had to say it in a nutshell, I think this chapter means to tell us that Jesus is very, very powerful. He is powerful in relation to the nations (“the ruler of the kings of the earth,” “on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail”). He is powerful in relation to the churches with a loud, loud voice, holding the angels of the churches and walking among the churches themselves. He holds the keys to death and Hades.

However, the issue of the nature of Jesus’ power—and the nature of God’s power, for that matter—is huge in understanding what Revelation might say to the 21^st century. When we get to chapter five, we will see the most important vision of the entire book. No one is found powerful enough to open the scroll that holds the fulfillment of history. So John weeps. Then he is told someone powerful enough has at last been found, so don’t weep. But what he sees is a slain and resurrected Lamb—the symbol for a very different kind of power.

Revelation challenges us to accept Lamb-power as actual power, the fundamental power of history, the kind of power that runs with the grain of the universe. But lambs don’t kill and dominate and instill fear and justify violence in the name of a “realistic” need for peace and order. Lambs don’t violently punish their enemies. But they provide the image for Revelation’s portrayal of the power that matters most.

The book A Force More Powerful, by Jack Duvall and Peter Ackerman, tells story after story of the effectiveness of Lamb-power in challenging forces of domination during the 20^th century. The salt marchers under Gandhi’s leadership, the people of Denmark who staged public hymn sings to defy Nazi occupation and smuggled almost every Jew in Denmark to safety, the steadfastly nonviolent union workers in Poland who patiently transformed their country from a satellite in the Soviet Communist bloc to a resilient democracy. These stories, which continue to be enacted in Liberia and Egypt and many other places around the world overthrow standard understandings of power.

Revelation is not precisely a blueprint for nonviolent political revolution, but it does provide a theology to inspire upside-down notions of politics—if we make the right choices when we read it.

So, we start with a sense that this is a Revelation that will tell us more about Jesus—not more about a different kind of Jesus who wields a death-dealing sword of judgment in his right hand, but more about the same Jesus of the Gospels whose “sword” comes out of his mouth. This sword coming from his mouth is kind of a grotesque image if we take it literally. But if we recognize the symbolism we may see the image pointing to the path Jesus trod during his life—his power was based on his defenseless testimony.

We keep our eyes open for indicators that this defenseless Jesus is the one being revealed in Revelation. And hidden in the opening verses is a description of Jesus that actually captures the essence of his testimony—and puts us on notice that the issues of politics, power, confronting domination are key parts of the revelation.

The pattern of Jesus

John offers his readers a blessing from God and from Jesus. And this is how he describes Jesus: “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth” (1:5). I believe that these three descriptors present in a nutshell what we could call the pattern of Jesus. This is the pattern of Jesus: Faithful living, to the point of suffering due to one’s resistance to the domination system, even to the point of death. Vindication by God, the witness sustained even through death, resurrection, sustained hope, true power. And then the status as ruler of the kings of the earth.

What does “ruler of the kings of the earth mean?” We’ll need to work through Revelation to get a better sense of how to answer this question. Let me suggest now that we should always keep in mind the there is only one Jesus who has only one way of ruling. He made that clear to his followers: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them. But it is not so among you; whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:42-43).

And let’s look ahead to how the story in Revelation ends: in the New Jerusalem we see a shocking image, given what happens between chapters six and 21. The domination system seeks to dominate using the violence of the kings of the earth—but notice how it all ends up: “The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it” (21:24). A verse later we are told that “nothing unclean” will enter the city.

That is, the Lamb as lamp gives light to the healed and transformed kings of the earth—ruling them with compassion and self-giving love. They are no longer unclean, that is, they no longer operate by the ethics of domination.

The relevance of an “exalted” Jesus

Revelation one definitely presents, with all its somewhat complicated imagery, an exalted picture of Jesus. But what’s the point of this picture for us today, living in a society that seems to share all too much in common with the beastly society of Revelation?

This is what I think. The exaltation of Jesus is here is not so much about establishing his identity as divinity incarnate. Revelation does link Jesus with God more closely than much of the rest of the New Testament. But why? Not to set the stage for the 4^th century creeds—creeds commissioned by the Roman emperor. Not to establish a doctrinal boundary marker to separate true believers from heretics.

It was something very different. Jesus is exalted here in the context of John’s book long critique of domination. John is shown Lamb-power as the true power of the universe. Even in the face of a sword wielding Empire. Even in the face of terrorism in service of anti-empire retribution. The exalted Lamb is exalted as Lamb, not as warrior. The exalted Lamb is exalted because of his faithful witness to persevering compassion and love.

In my History and Philosophy of Nonviolence class we are in the middle of looking at the American civil rights movement. A key moment in the movement came in Nashville in 1960 when a bunch of college students began a rigorously nonviolent campaign to integrate Nashville’s downtown lunch counters. At the heart of their group were several students from the poorest and least prestigious of Nashville’s several African-American colleges. But these students found themselves with extraordinary power due simply to their commitment to stand together for justice. And they met with great success and turned Nashville upside down.

And they weren’t ready to stop. Many of them headed farther south, in face of a much greater likelihood of death-dealing violence to join the Freedom Rides that sought to push for integration in Alabama and other states. The federal government was deeply alarmed with the students’ boldness. The students were willing to undergo great suffering in order to pressure the Kennedy administration actually to enforce anti-segregation laws.

A documentary on these events, called “Freedom Riders,” has an extraordinary clip of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Mr. Realpolitik in his brother’s administration. Kennedy rants, “who is Diane Nash? Who the hell is Diane Nash? Get her on the phone.” Diane Nash was the leader of the Nashville students, a college student, probably at most 21 years old. Kennedy’s assistant berated her, told her to get the students to stop. Kennedy didn’t want to be forced to act—and thereby alienate the racist southern Democrats who had voted for his brother.

But Nash wouldn’t budge. These students were ready to pay the ultimate price. A few did, others came pretty close. And Robert Kennedy backed down. Ultimately the federal government did act, and major changes came. Self-giving love as genuine power. The exalted Lamb. This revelation remains potent—and necessary in our car wreck of a world.

A call to see God’s power in the present

Let me close by bringing together two very unlikely partners in thought—Martin Heidegger and Wendell Berry. Heidegger, the great, controversial, and difficult to understand German philosopher, gave a famous interview not long before his death. He spoke pessimistically about the ways modern technology is dominating humanity more and more, and drives us ever deeper toward an abyss he could see little hope of escaping. As a statement, really, of his despair, he stated “only a god can save us.” He didn’t mean the personal God of the biblical tradition. The idea was more that we need some help from the outside, some kind of miracle to free us from technology’s ever more confining iron cage—a miracle he didn’t expect.

But then there is Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet-farmer who is well known for his critique of agribusiness and other dehumanizing dynamics in our modern world. But Berry holds out more hope that the iron cage is not the only reality. One of his great poems is called “The Wild Geese” where he draws on the promise of the tree in the persimmon seed and on the “ancient faith” that guides the wild geese on their way. Then he concludes, “We pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.”

Let me suggest we hold these two ideas together: “Only a god can save us” and “what we need is here.” I think the deepest message of Revelation is that the good creation is where Lamb-power is at work—but we need clear eyes to see that power and to trust that power. That is what the in breaking of God’s mercy can provide, faith to see that what we need is here. John’s hope in recording his revelation, I think, is to stimulate our imaginations to see what we need in the pattern of Jesus. And to know that it is here.

Amen.

Here is a link to all the sermons in this series.

Often discussion about the morality of warfare sets in opposition just war philosophy with pacifism. My intent in this paper is to challenge just war adherents to work within their tradition to overcome the scourge of war. I believe that the just war tradition, if vitalized, could become a powerful resource for overcoming the scourge of war. Though I am a pacifist myself, I believe that it is likely only through a vitalized just war approach that the power of militarism in United States society can be reduced.

The “Blank Check”

In practice, in the West throughout the past couple of thousand years two views concerning participation in warfare have been prominent—pacifism (characteristic of a tiny minority) and what I will call the “blank check.” The “blank check” says it is the citizen’s duty to do what the state asks. If the state says go to war, the citizen’s job is to obey, essentially without question. The just war philosophy has existed in the gray area between these two other views. Just war has mainly been about the ivory tower-type discussions of moral philosophers, usually about particular wars after the fact.

Augustine himself, considered the father of the just war doctrine, actually also taught a version of the blank check. Only the nation’s leaders had the role of determining a particular war’s justness; for the citizen, the task was simply to obey and assume that the leaders will suffer the consequences if they are fighting unjust wars.

Much more recently, conscription and options allowed soldiers have reflected this same dynamic—blank check or pacifism. People who can demonstrate that they are indeed pacifists (opposed to all war in principle) are allowed the legal recourse of conscientious objection. Everyone else is expected to enter the military if drafted and then obey their leaders, leaving to the leaders discernment about the justness of particular wars. The United States has never allowed those who adhere to just war principles to say, “No, I will not take part in this particular war because it is unjust.”

Those already in the military also have been allowed no recourse based on adherence to a just war philosophy. If you have a total change of heart and can demonstrate that you are now a pacifist you are allowed to leave the military are a conscientious objector. However, if you decide a particular war in unjust but you are not a pacifist, you are stuck. You still must offer the state a blank check and obey the command to fight.

These realities underscore the basic dilemma just war tradition faces—what can you do if you apply the just war approach and determine that a particular war is unjust? This dilemma tests the foundation of just war thought, the presumption against war. Following this presumption, one assumes that war bears the burden of proof—you don’t fight a war unless you prove that it is just. Historically, we have little evidence of the approach working this way in practice. As I said, in practice for almost everyone, the moral approach to participation in warfare has not been just war but blank check.

Using Just War Philosophy to Say No to War

However, the past 100 years, the “century of total war,” has seen some new developments in just war practices. Efforts have been made actually to apply this presumption against engaging in warfare. These efforts have led to a major divide within the just war camp, what I will call the “realist just war” over against the “critical just war.” The twentieth century (and now the 21^st century) has seen an attempt to take a critical stance toward particular wars as they are happening and even before they happen.

For example, during World War II, several American Catholic moral theologians and, notably, Church of England bishop George Bell wrote scathing critiques of the Allied use of saturation bombing on civilian areas in, first, Germany and then Japan. They claimed that these actions violated key just war principles such as non-combatant immunity and proportionality.

With the use of nuclear weapons, large numbers of people asserted that they could not support a potential future war on just war (rather than pacifist) grounds. A new term was coined: “nuclear pacifism,” the belief that no war that used nuclear weapons could ever be just.

Out of the Nuremberg Trials of German war criminals, came the so-called “Nuremberg principles” that asserted (contrary to Augustine’s teachings) that indeed soldiers are to held accountable for following unjust orders. Now, the idea gained currency that the locus for discernment about justice in war lay not only with the leaders but with each combatant—the implication being that soldiers now had an obligation to refuse unjust engagement (or at least could no longer use “simply following orders” as an excuse for unjust actions).

Then came the Vietnam War, unpopular and widely perceived as unjust by soldiers and potential soldiers. In an unprecedented way, masses of people inside a warring country actively opposed the war—largely on just war grounds. By the early 1970s, extraordinary numbers of draftees were applying for CO status, perhaps as many as 50%. It is doubtful very many of these CO applicants actually were pacifists; they were taking the one avenue available for those who concluded their particular war was unjust. Accordingly to draft laws, CO applications from just war objectors should not have been accepted; but many were. The glut of COs played a major role in the breaking down of the Selective Service System and the ending of the draft.

A final example, with the American movement toward war on Iraq after 9/11, a large protest movement emerged prior to the actual war. As it turned out, the protests did not stop the attack. However, it should still be noted that a large movement grounded, rhetorically at least, in just war thinking, opposed an actual war before it happened.

So what we see in the past 70 years is an unprecedented application of the presumption against violence and use of the just war criteria to actually opposes wars while, and even before, they happen. This development has underscored that there really are two different kinds of just war approaches.

“Realist Just War”: Tending toward Black Check

Alongside this “critical” approach I have just illustrated is a quite different approach that does not actually share the presumption against violence. Many of the prominent writers on just war in the past couple of generations (Catholic moral theologians William O’Brien, George Weigel, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Protestant ethicists Paul Ramsey and James Turner Johnson) have argued that just war thought is best applied to the restraint of war, not war’s prevention or abolition. This “realist” view accepts the inevitability and, at times, necessity of war and seeks to manage these necessary war so their damage is limited.

In the event, though, each of these moralists has supported whatever war the United States has engaged in—from World War II through Korea through the Cold War through Vietnam through the war against the Sandanistas in Nicaragua through the first Gulf War with Iraq through the post 9/11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq again.

So, one might wonder whether the “realist just war” approach is not actually mainly a rhetorically more moderate version of the blank check. These realist just war moralists assert strongly that the violation of just conduct criteria in World War II with the saturation bombing and use of atomic weapons did not render that war anything less than the paradigmatic just war. If the war is necessary, in practice any means required to win are justified.

In fact, the realist just war thinkers systematically have rewritten the application of just war criteria in light of the phenomenon of modern war. The need for a formal declaration of war had been more or less jettisoned. This is the case because requiring such often gives the enemy the unfair advantage of being warned ahead of time.

Proportionality is extremely difficult to determine. It is virtually impossible to tell ahead of time whether our response to unjust aggression will cause more damage to humankind than our being defeated would. Discrimination has become more of an ideal having to do with intent than with results. What matters most is that we not intentionally attack non-combatants. The power of modern weapons is such that in practice it is impossible to avoid completely hurting civilians even when military targets are attacked. Also military targets have become so entwined with the civilian infrastructure of societies that they cannot be engaged without damage to noncombatants. But if such resistance is necessary (as it is, given the assumption regarding the necessity of warfare), then damage to civilians is inevitable—though it should be minimized as much as possible.

Though these “realists” argue for the necessity of restraint in the conduct of wars (and such arguments have surely had some effect), their stance toward the actual wars of America show that restraint is a secondary concern. The main concern is to win these various “necessary wars”—a concern that looks an awful lot like giving the state a blank check.

Likewise, perhaps also the “critical just war” approach is not that far from being a rhetorically more moderate version of pacifism. It would be a near-pacifism arrived at on pragmatic grounds more than principled grounds, based on the view that actual war in history can no longer satisfy the just war criteria (examples of such thinkers could be Jonathan Schell and Noam Chomsky). Here, the presumption against violence leads to a rejection of just about all actual wars.

The Just War Choice

So, this is the divide: traditional just war approaches would provide pretty strong evidence against the justifiability of modern wars (for example, over the course of the 20^th century the proportion of civilian casualties to soldier casualties changed from 10% civilians and 90% soldiers to just the opposite, 90% civilians and 10 soldiers). This leaves the just war advocate with a choice—do you change the criteria so you can still try to have some impact on restraining war? Or do you keep applying the same criteria and assume they do work—in the sense of providing the moral imperative of rejecting the moral legitimacy of war?

Should just war adherents commit themselves rigorously to applying the criteria and then actually saying no to warfare, some major moves away from militarism in our society might be possible.

[This paper was presented at a symposium on "Just War Since 9/11" held at James Madison University, October 5, 2011]

If there is one passage in the entire Bible that points to both the glory and the shame of Christianity, it is this famous statement by Jesus: “I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Mt 5:44-45).  Here we have a direct statement of a profound ideal, a call to break the cycle of violence that so bedevils our world.  And here we have as stark a reminder as we could imagine of just how far Christianity tends to have strayed from the will of its founder.

“Love Your Enemies”: An Obvious Need in Our World

“Love your enemies,” such an obvious statement of what our world needs.  We see so clearly in our present day how hatred of enemies fuels war with simply incredible costs – in the name of stamping out “terrorists” our country spends billions upon billions to pour violence upon the nation of Iraq, diverts resources in a way that made the Gulf Coast more vulnerable to devastation from recent hurricanes, alienates people throughout the world, sends hundreds upon hundreds of our soldiers to their death along with thousands upon thousands of Iraqis.  This hatred fuels a spinning cycle, eye for an eye for an eye leading to more and more blindness.

Hatred of enemies fuels our nation’s prison-industrial complex, sending millions behind bars where they are all too often brutalized, infected with devastating diseases such as hepatitis, permanently disenfranchised as stakeholders in civil society (as someone said, no matter how long a convicted criminal’s official sentence might be, it is invariably a “life sentence” in terms of the impact going to prison has on one’s life).  In the name of “security,” we only increase the spiral of destruction and alienation.

In many other ways as well, hatred of enemies leads to unhappiness, brokenness, pain being visited upon pain – and the cycle of creating only more hatred.  So, Jesus’ words cut like a warm knife through butter.  He gets to the heart of things – we need to find ways to love instead of hate.  We need to find ways to forgive instead of simply punish.  We need to find ways to heal when there is brokenness, not simply retaliate.

We also need the vision of God these verses give us.  The One who models love for enemies.  The One who offers generosity and genuine wholeness, who gives us hope, who empowers us to find another way from the spiral of death.

Jesus’ words seem so obvious.  What could be more straightforward and more needed than Jesus’ incisive words?  We need them now more than ever; they come to us straight and clear.

If it were only that simple.

If only Jesus’ words would set the agenda for Christians in our needy world today.  If only being a Christian would mean ending hatred of enemies.  But, it doesn’t work this way, sad to say.  We Christians actually aren’t that good at loving our enemies.  And I struggle to understand why.

Conversion to Christianity—And War Support

I think back on my own experience.  I grew up in a gentle, humanistic family with definite instincts toward being peaceable.  I wasn’t taught pacifism – nor Christianity, at least not very directly.  But during the latter years of the Vietnam War as I was coming of age and facing the possibility of the draft, I knew I had no urge to go to war.  But then, at age 17, I became a Christian.  The church I joined did teach me that war could be God’s will.

Some of you may remember the state of Oregon’s Republican (believe it or not) Senator Mark Hatfield.  Hatfield openly opposed the Vietnam War – everyone knew this about him.  When I learned that he was a Christian, a Baptist like me, I was shocked.  When I talked with my pastor, he said, I don’t believe it either.  How could Hatfield possibly be a true Christian while also opposing the war….Becoming a Christian made me more likely to embrace warfare.

A book I read a while ago (Harry Potter, Standing in Judgment) tells the story of the struggle, ultimately successful, in Britain to abolish the death penalty.  In the end, the only major opposition to abolition came from the Church of England. Only when Church leaders finally supported abolition did it happen.  Official Christianity had to be dragged kicking and screaming into saying no to the death penalty.

Recent surveys in the United States indicate that people who identify themselves as Christians are more likely to support the death penalty than non-Christians.  People who identify themselves as Christians are more likely to support war in Iraq than non-Christians.

Why Don’t We Christians Love Our Enemies? A Suggestion

What’s going on here?  How could Jesus have been more clear?  Why don’t we Christians love our enemies?  Why, in fact, are we Christians more likely to support violence against enemies?  Just imagine what would happen if the large majority of Christians in the United States decided to have our ethics determined by Jesus’ clear teaching.

There are many factors, surely, that come between Jesus’ words and Christian practices and attitudes.  As a theologian, I am especially interested in the factors related to beliefs about God and about God’s will for our lives.  What beliefs lead Christians to marginalize Jesus’ call to love enemies?  I have some thoughts I would like to test with you.

This is what I suspect may be the main reason why we Christians don’t love our enemies.  We Christians tend to believe in a difference, a fundamental, we could say “ontological,” difference between being a Christian and being a non-Christian.  We tend to see these as two clearly separate categories.  When we make a basic split between two distinct kinds of people, what we call believers and what we call non-believers, we may well set ourselves up to dismiss the centrality of Jesus’ teaching about loving enemies.

It seems to be very important for us to “other” people we hurt – to think of them as different, as other than we are.  We have to think of an enemy as in some sense not fully a part of our identity group.  Soldiers are trained to do this, because we have discovered a surprising and powerful reluctance on the part of most people to kill.  Somehow this reluctance needs to be drilled out of soldiers.  One way this is done is by chanting, “gook,” or “Jap,” or “Kraut,” or “towel-head,” or “terrorist.”  These aren’t fully human people; they are “other.”

I remember a powerful scene in the anti-Vietnam War movie “Hearts and Minds.”  A U.S. General tells the camera how these people in East Asian cultures simply don’t value life like we Westerners, so we needn’t worry too much about killing so many people.  The next clip is of an inconsolably weeping mother next to the lifeless form of her child.

In the criminal justice system, prisoners must be dehumanized.  Criminals are seen as different.  They have forfeited their rights to be fully human.  They are a different class, a different race, at least a different personality.  So we aren’t as likely to limit the brutalizing; we’re even willing to execute such like.

In his book, American Colonies, historian Alan Taylor tells of how the European settlers in North America thought of Natives and Africans as less than fully human.  Part of the “othering” came because these were non-Christians.  So the “Christian” Europeans could be more comfortable enslaving, dispossessing, even massacring the Natives and Africans.

Loving Enemies = Abolishing “Othering”

Now, certainly most people who make a clear distinction between Christians and non-Christians are not going to use this distinction as a basis for violence.  But I am suggesting that such a distinction carries within it a dynamic that can lead to the “othering” that does lead to violence.  The call to love enemies, I believe, is best seen not as a call to love the other while still seeing them as other.  Rather, the call to love enemies is a call to abolish “othering.”

The best expression of this comes from Jesus’ famous story of the Good Samaritan.  Jesus responds to the question of how one gains eternal life with the basic command: Love God and love neighbor.  But who is my neighbor?  Jesus tells this story that radicalizes the discussion.  The Samaritan was the Jew’s enemy.  So, when the Samaritan – at great risk to himself – stops to help the beaten and robbed traveler, who happens to be a Jew, he shows how he, as a Samaritan, makes his enemy his neighbor.  And, he is being used by Jesus as a model for Jesus’ fellow Jews.  It’s a doubly reinforced point – the Samaritan himself is your neighbor, and your model.

So, “love your neighbor” means the same as “love your enemy.”  This is to say, there no longer is any basis for “othering” the enemy.  Jesus is not saying, love someone who you still see as other.  That can easily become paternalism, where we maintain a sense of superiority and difference – the pathogen causing hatred remains in the system, the enemy is still other.  Maybe we can make ourselves love them for awhile – but the otherness will surface in time.

Another image that is used later in the New Testament is of a wall that is torn down, the wall that separates Jew from Gentile.  This wall was the basis of much violence – it is what stimulated the religious leaders to send Jesus to be executed.  It is what stimulated the Pharisee Saul to persecute Christians, before he met Jesus and had the wall in his own heart torn down and became the Apostle Paul.  In Ephesians we read that Jesus comes to make peace, to take away the “othering” that triggers such violence.

Jesus shows us that there is one humanity.  There are no “others” who are a different kind of human being.  Paul speaks from his own experience as one who used otherness as a basis for violence.  He insists in the strongest terms that in Christ, there is no Jew over against Gentile, there is no male over against female, there is no slave over against free.  When we look at the world through Christ’s eyes, “othering” ends – we are all one.

The Vocation of God’s People: Love All People

Seeing the world in this way, we may understand Jesus’ message to us to be this: He says to us: your calling, your vocation, your “chosenness” as my people is to be found in one thing only.  Your call, your vocation is to love all people as your neighbors, as your fellow human beings, as your siblings in the family of God’s children.

This vocation goes all the way back to Abraham and Sarah.  God gave them a promise, a calling, when God gave them children in the face of Sarah’s barrenness.  God called them to bless all the families of the earth.  God chose them for this task of being a witness to the love of God for all people.

And almost from the beginning, Abraham’s descendants have struggled with their chosenness.  All too easily the calling has been understood to be a calling to be different in order that they alone might be blessed, in distinction from those outside the promise.  It’s like an old professor of mine once said, what good is heaven if there are not people who are sent to hell?

This is a huge tension throughout the Bible.  Read in light of Jesus’ message, though, I think we are bound to see the message to Abraham making strictly a practical distinction – the sense of difference is for the purpose of being clear about God’s character and God’s love, not in order to be better than or other than or superior to those on the outside.  We become clear about God’s love so that we may be indiscriminate in sharing it, welcoming everyone as our neighbor.

So, I am proposing one way to answer this question: why do we Christians not love our enemies?  We do not love our enemies because we imagine that they are other than ourselves.

In doing so, we forget God’s character.  Just as all people are one in feeling sunshine, just as all people are one in receiving rain – so are all people one in God’s love.

Every semester in my ethics class, we read a wonderful book that never fails to inspire me (even after 16 readings!) – Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed by Philip Hallie.  This book tells of French villagers, Protestant Christians, profoundly risking their loved to provide sanctuary for Jews fleeing the Nazis during World War II.

The key moment in the story happens early one.  A Jewish refugee knocks on the parsonage door seeking a place of safety.  The pastor’s wife, Magda, answers – and without hesitation, says, yes, yes, of course, come in.  Everything follows from that first act of welcome.

To Magda, love meant, yes, yes, of course, we are all one – “othering” is simply not imaginable.  That’s what Jesus calls us to.

Amen.

[This sermon was presented at Seattle Mennonite Church, October 5, 2005 and Shalom Mennonite Congregation, February 26, 2006.]