Imperial Values in the Age of the Empire – Then and Now

Empire, then and now

The Roman Empire is the setting for what we read about in the New Testament. The Empire strongly influenced the lives of Jesus, Paul, and the other earliest Christians. As Christians today, however, we often fail to recognize this all-pervasive influence. We miss what was originally being said by the titles that we assume referred only to Jesus. We tend not to notice how boldly Jesus resisted the Roman Empire and contrasted it to the Kingdom of God.

Also, we may not notice how empire shows up in our world today, leading many observers to call the U.S. today’s equivalent of first-century Rome. Our lack of awareness sometimes keeps us from seeing how we as Christians need to be opposing the empire’s current manifestations.

Following Jesus in today’s empire

In recent years, the discovery and analysis of Roman artifacts, buildings, and documents have brought more to light about the Roman Empire and the early Christians’ responses to it. Leading Christian scholars are making known what life was like in the Empire, how it influenced early Christianity, and how similar features appear in today’s world.

Prominent among these scholars is John Dominic Crossan. Born a Roman Catholic in Ireland, Crossan was a monk for nineteen years before he left the priesthood. Lately, he has focused especially on what ancient documents, coins, and ruins of buildings reveal about the Roman Empire’s operation and Jesus’s response. His findings make him concerned about how today’s Christian Americans need to be responding to the American empire.

The glue that held the world together

In his book God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), Dominic Crossan describes how the ideology of the Roman Empire affected all of life. He calls it the glue that held the civilized world together. Document fragments discovered in recent years reveal important parts of this picture. However, because few people living in the Roman Empire could read and write, sculptures, paintings, coins, monuments, and public buildings furnished a lot of the “glue.”

Another Christian theologian and scholar writing about the empire’s influence on both the early church and our world today is Joerg Rieger, a professor at Perkins School of Theology. In his book Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Fortress, 2007), he reminds us that the Roman Empire’s imperial temples and sanctuaries occupied the most prestigious locations of a city, giving strong visual messages about the emperor. Also, the priests of the emperor cult played roles that go beyond our view of religion. They came from the wealthiest and most influential families and were among the most influential political figures. Besides, the emperor cult was considered mutually beneficial for rulers and ruled, so no direct coercion to enforce participation in it seemed necessary.

Using Caesar’s titles for Jesus

Roman buildings, coins, and documents reveal the many ways in which Roman emperors were portrayed as divine, these and other scholars find. Crossan challenges us with this: “There was a human being in the first century who was called ‘Divine,’ ‘Son of God,’ ‘God,’ and ‘God from God,’ whose titles were ‘Lord,’ ‘Redeemer,’ ‘Liberator,’ and ‘Savior of the World.’ Who was that person?”

Most Christians and most other people who know the Western tradition, Crossan guesses, would answer that it was Jesus. Most apparently think that those titles were originally created to describe him and were uniquely applied to him. “But before Jesus ever existed,” Crossan assures us, “all those terms belonged to Caesar Augustus. To proclaim them of Jesus the Christ was thereby to deny them of Caesar Augustus. Christians ... were taking the identity of the Roman emperor and giving it to a Jewish peasant.” This, observes Crossan, was high treason.

A virgin birth and a guiding star

I’ve been surprised to learn how many terms that we see as Christian was originally used for Roman emperors, and how widely they were used throughout the Empire. However, I’ve been even more surprised by how many of the claims made about Jesus in the gospels and other familiar Christian statements were originally made about emperors.

Crossan points out that no one else in the New Testament or the earliest Christian literature gives evidence of knowing the stories of Jesus’s birth and destiny that Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 present. They apparently are deliberately designed to contradict Roman imperial theology’s story of Augustus’s birth and destiny. Crossan thus considers them symbolic rather than intended to be historically factual. Matthew traces Jesus’s genealogy back to Abraham, and Luke, after starting his account by specifically mentioning Caesar Augustus, traces Jesus’s ancestry back to Adam. These claims, plus saying that Jesus was born of a human virgin impregnated by God, seem like direct efforts to outdo the widespread claim that Augustus was descended from the virgin goddess Aphrodite-Venus and the Trojan hero Anchises.

The Christian story’s direct challenge to the Empire story shows up in other ways too. Herod was officially appointed King of the Jews by Roman authority. And Augustus’s Trojan ancestors were claimed to have been led from Troy to Italy by Venus’s western star. Similarly, in Matthew, the story of Jesus’s birth describes wise men from the East following a star to Jerusalem and asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?” In Crossan’s view, this deliberately says “a new and therefore a replacement King of the Jews has been appointed by God and not by Rome.”

Good news from heaven and the Senate

A few years after Caesar Augustus became the emperor, Crossan reports, it was decided that from then on, in the province of Asia, each year would begin on the birthday of Augustus. In the official announcement, he was described as a savior whose epiphany brought peace to mankind. The birthday of the god (Augustus), said the decree, was the ultimate good tidings for the world, announced from heaven above. And the word for these tidings came from the same root as the word used by Christians for “gospel” or “good news.”

Although Augustus apparently didn’t present himself directly as God, writes Rieger, and his successor Tiberius was even more reluctant, people honored them like gods. “When Augustus died in 14 CE,” Rieger finds, “the Roman Senate even decreed his ascension into heaven.” Caligula, the emperor after Tiberius, and Nero, emperor when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, were emphatic about their divinity.

Peace through justice or through victory?

 Titles of divinity would have seemed fully appropriate, Crossan points out,  for someone who had saved the world from war and established peace on earth, as Augustus was said to have done. His method was to create peace through religion, war, and victory.  Religion here meant keeping the gods on Rome’s side in order to have their aid in winning battles and wars, and the resulting peace on land and sea was obtained through military victory.  Of course, Crossan reminds us, this kind of victory “does not bring peace but only a lull—whether short or long—and after each lull the violence required for the next victory escalates.” 

People saw the emperor, however, as a savior who brought not only peace and security but also healing.  The first Christians therefore had to make clear that the benefits of their way were equally desirable and not just temporary. The program they presented in direct contrast to the Empire’s program of religion, war, victory, and peace, Crossan observes, was religion, nonviolence, justice, and peace. Stated more succinctly, says Crossan, it was “first justice, then peace,” or “peace through justice.”

Resistance that’s easy to overlook

Dominic Crossan sees Pilate as the most important interpreter of Jesus in the New Testament. Crossan sees this especially in the scene in which Pilate and Jesus confront each other.  Jesus says his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36) and that unlike the world’s way, his followers are not fighting Pilate’s.

For Crossan and Marcus Borg, another example of Jesus’s deliberately resisting the Roman Empire is his procession into Jerusalem on what we now call Palm Sunday. Borg and Crossan describe it powerfully in their book The Last Week (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). “Two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in the year 30,” their account begins. “One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. From the east, Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers. ... On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate ... entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. Jesus’s procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of the empire.” Jesus’s group apparently was making what we’d call today a planned political demonstration, but I’d never realized that until I read Borg and Crossan’s explanation. The direct contrast of the two processions isn’t made explicit in the Bible.

It’s hard, therefore, for non-scholar Bible readers like me to recognize the full implications of such scriptures. As Crossan points out, in the gospels Jesus never mentions Rome or addresses Pilate by name, despite being condemned to death by Roman Pilate, in Roman Judea, in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. Thus it’s easy to overlook the many ways in which Jesus and his early followers actively opposed and resisted the Roman Empire. That oversight becomes especially apparent when churches unwittingly do things like using “centurions” as a label of honor.

In the next Connections I’ll say more about what contemporary scholars see as the main features of empire and the early Christians’ resistance, along with how empire shows up today and needs to be resisted by today’s Christians.

NATION – EMPIRE

from 9-07

Empire—still present today

Why do today’s Christian Americans need to know what the Roman Empire was like, and how Jesus, Paul, and other early Christians actively resisted it? A big reason is that many well-informed and perceptive observers today are saying that America is the new Roman Empire.

This observation has been made occasionally for at least a hundred and fifty years, but lately it’s being made more often and with much more urgency by many of today’s Christian thinkers. They’re saying that in crucially important ways the twenty-first-century U.S. is like first-century Rome. These scholars therefore believe today’s U.S. Christians need to be actively resisting much of what our nation is currently doing, just as Jesus and first-century Christians resisted the Roman Empire.

Insights to take seriously

Because the results of failing to resist could be so dire if these thinkers’ observations are correct, we need to become aware of them and seriously consider the possibility that they are in fact correct.

In last month’s Connections I quoted two of these scholars, John Dominic Crossan and Joerg Rieger. This issue includes more of their concerns and also some from a recent book of essays by four other scholars. It’s The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God: A Political, Economic, Religious Statement (Westminster John Knox. 2006). Its authors are David Ray Griffin, who is Jewish, and John B. Cobb Jr., Richard A. Falk, and Catherine Keller, who are Christian. All are current or emeritus professors at major universities or seminaries.

A different kind of empire

It’s hard to realize that our own nation is operating an empire. One reason is that the empire we’ve known best has been the colonial empire Great Britain had in recent centuries. As Richard Falk observes, thinking only of that kind of empire, along with “overlooking the awkward fact that America did have a few formal colonies,” has made it easy to deny that our country rules over an ever-growing empire. In Falk’s view, we ignore the fact that American business and political leaders have made “a conscious decision to create a different kind of empire: a neocolonial empire, sometimes called an informal empire.”

Also, David Ray Griffin points out, we’ve gotten our empire through a strategy “which was executed about equally by Republican and Democratic administrations for well over a century.” As a result, the imperial way of operating seems normal to us and has crept into all aspects of our society, so goes unnoticed. In Joerg Rieger’s view, it reaches “into our collective unconscious and thus into our deepest theological thoughts.”

What kind of God?

Especially influential for Christians has been the fact that we’ve so often heard the imperial way of functioning cloaked in religious language. Rieger warns us, however, that whenever empires try to justify themselves in reference to God, we need to ask what kind of God is being referred to. Christians say they believe God is like Jesus, who taught and modeled compassion, justice, and nonviolence, yet the god our leaders talk about usually seems to be a god of war and of feeling free to overpower others and even be cruel if that’s what we think preserving our comfort and safety requires.

Declared goals and real goals

There’s often a big gap, too, between what leaders claim our nation’s goals are, and what they later turn out to have been. We sometimes discover too late that the main goals for national policies were the wishes of large corporations, of corrupt leaders, or at least of citizens determined to protect their luxuries. Yet leaders make a practice of publicly claiming that their goal is to carry out the benevolent intentions of God or at least of our nation’s founders. This can hide the fact that we’ve become an empire.

Not benign

If we notice, we tell ourselves that we may be an empire but that unlike the cruel empires we know about from world history, our empire is benign. Its goal, we assure ourselves, is strictly to use our power for doing good.

Many current observers are saying, however, and urgently trying to bring to our attention, that it’s not benign to consider ourselves exempt from international policies that we insist are binding on others. We don’t want other nations to have nuclear weapons, but we reserve the right to have them. We want other nations to stop polluting, but we don’t want to have to stop. That’s not a benign attitude.

John Cobb believes that, in addition, economic theory has become our basic theology. We treat wealth as the supreme value. Yet from a Christian point of view, Cobb reminds us, this is wrong. It doesn’t consider justice, community, or the natural world.  It is not benign.

Not accidental

Besides assuming that our empire is benign, we tend to assume that we’ve acquired it accidentally. We say that we don’t violently or even deliberately take over other nations or groups. Yet critics, including many Christians, point out many groups we’ve very deliberately taken over, starting with Native Americans and continuing with African slaves, and with invasions of Central and South American countries, installation of right-wing governments in Europe and the Philippines, and helping to oust Palestinians in order to create Israel.

Four kinds of power

Today’s American empire has many of the same features that made the Roman Empire powerful. Dominic Crossan uses the findings of sociologist Michael Mann to describe these features. He sees “social power”—power over groups of people—as a combination of four types of power. Crossan sees Rome having used all four of these types in both violent and nonviolent ways. Its nonviolent power of persuasion was backed up by its violent power of domination and repression.

• Military power comes from monopolizing the use of force and violence or at least being able to control it, by having greater military strength than anyone else. The Roman Empire’s military power, Crossan tells us, was based on its more than twenty legions, each composed of six thousand fighting engineers who were stationed along all rivers and frontiers. They built the network of roads and bridges that enabled Rome to move quickly throughout its empire and crush any rebellion that might arise anywhere.

• Political power comes from monopolizing or controlling the organizational structure of the society. For Rome, this power came through an aristocracy of local elites throughout the empire, who got benefits in return for loyalty to the emperor.

• Economic power comes from monopolizing or controlling money, sources of labor, and means of production. Rome’s economic power, Crossan finds, came from its network of roads, available for travel and commerce, and from the cash payments made to the legions on all its frontiers. Cobb sees America’s dominance of organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and various trade organizations, in addition to its support of multinational corporations, as huge factors in the American empire’s economic power. And in his view, “We did not acknowledge to ourselves our complicity and leadership in establishing, through economic policies, a neocolonial global system ordered largely to our benefit.”

• Ideological power comes from telling people what to believe, and what events and policies mean. In the Roman Empire this power was created by the imperial theology, which declared the emperor’s divine status on coins, buildings, and statues and in stories everyone knew. Crossan feels it is impossible to overestimate the importance of this “glue” that held the empire together. Rieger describes it as being like the air that people in the Roman Empire breathed. The imperial theology, he reminds us, led them to believe that the Empire was willed by the gods and based on the laws of nature. They came to believe, says Rieger, “that the gods favored them because of their piety and justice, and that an empire based on those values could only be a good thing.”

More powerful than Rome 

All of these scholars see these same kinds of power being used today by the American empire. Our use of military power is obvious. Much of our economic and political power is obvious, too, and more is evident to those who investigate. So is our empire’s ideological power, through leaders’ frequent claims of having God’s blessing and having only good intentions in all that we do.

In many ways, the American empire is much more powerful than Rome’s was. The Roman Empire was territorial, Crossan and other scholars remind us, but ours is global.

Actually, it’s more than global. It’s cosmic. Rome’s emperors claimed dominion over land and sea, but we’re working diligently to control space too. David Ray Griffin reports that the head of the U.S. Space Command, General Lance Lord—an ominous name—has stated its goal as “space superiority,” which Lord has defined as “freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack.” (And one Space Command program, Griffin tells us, is named “Rods from God”!)

Considering Christian resistance today

With observations like the ones, I’ve quoted here coming from so many well-informed people today, including many committed Christians, even if our first reaction is to say they’re wrong we need to consider seriously the possibility that they’re right.

Next month I’ll end this series of three Connections issues about empire with some Christian thinkers’ observations about the contrast between empire and the Kingdom of God. I’ll include thoughts about how today’s Christians need to resist today’s empire, just as Jesus and his early followers resisted the Roman Empire. I hope you’ll stay connected.

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Reconsidering a familiar claim

For years I’ve seen this quote, whose source is evidently unknown. You’ve probably seen it too.

“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back into bondage.”

Our nation passed the 200-year point several years ago and we’re still here, so maybe this list doesn’t fit. Or maybe we’re in bondage but just haven’t collapsed yet.

What kind of faith and courage?

 Still, many Christians cite the above quote as evidence that America is at death’s door and needs to recover what it has lost. But to them, military might seems to be the means for recovering our liberty. Also, they usually seem to be claiming that to recover our spiritual faith we must return to strict adherence to rigid Christian rules, beliefs, and doctrines. That view, however, ignores the religious diversity that existed in the original U.S. It ignores the fact that several of our founders weren’t Christian or at least weren’t what today’s conservative Christians consider orthodox.

Neither doctrine nor military might is what the Christians I quote in this Connections mean when they urge us to resist today’s empire by more faithfully following Jesus’s teaching and example. They are urging us to give up some of the abundance we’re used to. They are urging us to stop being complacent and apathetic. They‘re certainly urging us to become courageous. But the Christian courage they want us to display involves promoting justice and refusing to use violence. That’s very different from advocating ancient rules and doctrines and more war.

NATION – EMPIRE

from 10-07p

Empire and the realm of God

Empire is still with us today. In fact, in some ways it is stronger than ever now. Unlike the Roman Empire of the first century, in which Christianity arose, and the other empires prominent in world history, today’s American empire has no geographical boundaries. It even extends into space, so it is not only global but cosmic. Many of us Americans are reluctant to see it as an empire, but even if we admit that it is, we tend to see it as benign and accidental. However, leading Christian thinkers are insisting that it is neither benign nor accidental.

They’re also pointing out how Jesus and his earliest followers actively resisted the Roman Empire. Sometimes the resistance was relatively subtle though still treasonous, such as applying the emperor’s titles to Jesus. Sometimes it wasn’t subtle at all but involved instead what we’d now call public political demonstrations, as when Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey with his followers when Pilate was entering from the opposite direction in an imperial procession.

Has the church’s emphasis changed?

Many Christian thinkers today are reminding us how strongly Jesus seems to have emphasized the kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven, and how he contrasted it to the Roman Empire. Some of these thinkers are observing to their dismay, however, that in today’s church we give little emphasis to what Jesus apparently said about the kingdom of God. We focus more, these scholars find, on a kind of personal salvation that doesn’t seem to have had high priority in Jesus’s teaching. If they’re right, we need to take a fresh look at the gospels and reconsider our priorities.

We sometimes miss the point

Many of us miss some of the main points in scripture passages because we don’t know much about the history and culture they arose from. This seems to be especially true with New Testament passages that refer to their Roman Empire setting. They don’t explicitly mention it, because their original readers were well aware of it. Most of us aren’t, however, so we miss some of what is being said about how Jesus and his early followers resisted the Empire.

“Give the Spirit something to work with”

Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, a professor at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, mentions this problem in her book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco 2006). She tells how some of her students insist that they don’t need to know much about scriptures’ historical and cultural setting. “I read the text,” they say, “and the Holy Spirit guides me.” But Levine doesn’t consider this a valid reason for staying uninformed. She advises them, “Give the Holy Spirit something to work with.”

Levine tells, for example, how the story of Jesus’s expulsion of demons into a herd of pigs (whose meat was forbidden to Jews), in Mark 5:1-20, refers to the Empire in a way many of today’s Bible readers miss. Besides giving a less than subtle clue to the non-Jewish composition of the population, she explains, “the story also allows a nice political dig against Rome, given that the ‘unclean spirits’ identify themselves as ‘Legion,’ the Latin term for an army cohort.”

We miss the challenge

Levine finds that we miss the challenge in many of Jesus’s parables because we don’t realize how their original hearers experienced the Roman Empire. Luke has filled his narrative with stories of righteous tax collectors, Levine explains, and “in Jesus’s time the tax collector was the agent of the Roman government occupying Judea. Thus ‘faithful tax collector’ would have been an oxymoron.” Christians today who fail to notice the tax collector as an agent of a foreign, invading government will miss the shock value and political implications of such stories, Levine warns us.

Another example of why we need to know about the Empire is the fact that, according to Levine, the Caesars on the throne in Rome were called “father,” much like the way in which Americans call George Washington “Father of our country.” Thus by speaking of the “Father in heaven, ” Levine explains, Jesus is insisting that Rome is not the true father. “The address to God as Father,” she points out, “whether offered by Jesus or anyone else, signals more than piety. It also has a political edge.”

Not a kingdom of the afterlife

In his book God and Empire, John Dominic Crossan says he finds it unfortunate that the expression “Kingdom of Heaven” ever entered the Christian vocabulary. Because many of us are unfamiliar with the expression’s original Roman Empire setting, we miss much of its meaning. It is all too often misinterpreted, Crossan finds, as the Kingdom of the future, of the next world, of the afterlife. But what was originally meant was “what this world would look like if and when God sat on Caesar’s throne, or if and when God lived in Antipas’s palace. ... It is about the transformation of this world into holiness, not the evacuation of this world into heaven.”

Crossan reminds us that in the New Testament the expression “Kingdom of Heaven” is used only by Matthew, while “Kingdom of God” is used by several Bible authors. And for Matthew, Crossan observes, “heaven” was simply a euphemism for “God.” It was like our saying “the White House announces” to mean “the president announces.”

100 percent political and religious

Crossan is emphatic about the political implications here. “The Kingdom of God,” he explains, “is inextricably and simultaneously 100 percent political and 100 percent religious. ‘Kingdom’ is a political term, ‘God’ is a religious term, and Jesus would be executed for that ‘of’ in a world where, for Rome, God already sat on Caesar’s throne because Caesar was God.” Nobody in the first century, Crossan finds from his research, made a distinction between political and religious, the way we do today. “The emperor’s divinity,” he finds, “was the incarnate heart of Roman imperial theology and stayed as such long after Augustus was dead.”

“Jesus announced the presence of the Kingdom of God,” Crossan reminds us, “by inviting all to come and see how he and his companions had already accepted it, had already entered it, and were already living in it. ... Basically it was this: heal the sick, eat with those you heal, and announce the Kingdom’s presence in that mutuality. [Crossan’s italics]... The logic of Jesus’s Kingdom program is a mutuality of healing (the basic spiritual power) and eating (the basic physical power), shared freely and openly.”

How should we resist?

In theologian John Cobb’s view, expressed in an essay in The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God, the main Christian basis for resistance to empire can easily be seen even by casual readers of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It is what Jesus’s parables and other teachings describe, and what his behavior demonstrates. We usually call it the kingdom of God, but Cobb prefers to call it the commonwealth of God. “This term,” in his view, “besides not emphasizing the controlling power of a ruler, suggests that the realm may be organized for the common good.”

Compared to such a realm, observes Cobb, “clearly a society in which people can survive only through cutthroat competition does not measure up well. The same is true of a society that invites its members to take pride in militarily imposing their collective will on others.”

Christianity’s emphasis has changed

In Cobb’s view, the church has made little of the kingdom over the centuries. For the majority of Christians, Cobb observes, Christianity has changed to emphasizing personal salvation from sin, guilt, and hell, while supporting empire instead of resisting it as Jesus and his first followers did.

Many of today’s thinkers see crucial questions confronting American Christians. “How can we be faithful in the American Empire?” “How should we resist the imperial normalcy that we’re part of?” Cobb and the other Christian scholars I’ve quoted in this and the previous two Connections feel strongly that the implications of Jesus’s message extend to what we classify today as political action. Yet well-funded, well-organized groups of United Methodists are aggressively trying to eliminate the UMC agency responsible for carrying out political action on behalf of the denomination. That’s one of several ways in which many of today’s churchgoers ignore or even oppose what Jesus gave high priority to.

“One who takes Jesus’s message seriously,” writes Cobb, “is called in our day to work for the improvement of the lot of the poor through political channels as well as private and ecclesiastical ones. Today that means that we are called to work against American empire.” It means, he feels, that we must work toward eventual global governance by democratic free institutions instead of by an imperial power.

Cobb recognizes that reaching this goal would require an enormous shift. He acknowledges that we will never achieve perfection with regard to ideals such as getting our society to renounce the use of violence. However, he feels we must work for whatever improvements are possible. He sees our main current task as speaking up about the need for a profound reversal of empire’s values. And theologian Joerg Rieger, in his Christ and Empire, reminds us that in today’s situation, in which empire determines what is “normal,” failure to name this normalcy for what it is, and to resist it, amounts to supporting it.

Called to fan the sparks into flame

“We who call ourselves Christians,” Cobb writes, “are called to fan the sparks of the message into a flame that can help to reverse the headlong plunge of our nation into the lust for world domination.” Few of today’s churchgoers seem willing to risk doing much of that fanning, but it apparently is essential for all of us in today’s world who want to be faithful to the teaching and example of Jesus.

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The church changed more than the empire

In an essay in the book The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God, Christian scholar John Cobb writes about the source of the values that oppose empire. “Chiefly,” Cobb finds, “these contra-imperial ideals can be traced to what Karl Jaspers has taught us to call the Axial Age, the period during the middle of the first millennium before the Common Era, when the philosophies and religious traditions that still shape much of the mind of the world came into existence.” (This is the period that Karen Armstrong describes in her book The Great Transformation, which I wrote about in the July 2007 Connections.)

An imperial period that evoked reflection

The Axial Age values arose, Cobb explains, “in an imperial period that evoked individual reflection as a response. This reflection was about how the world and human society are actually to be constructed, and about what is truly valuable and worthwhile for individual people in their relations with others. The answers arose not so much from the study of ancient texts as from fresh thought and insight.”

The answers arising in the Axial Age were diverse, Cobb points out, but they all proposed values that, if taken with full seriousness, would lead away from imperialism. These values, Cobb explains, have been mediated to today’s world mainly through Jesus and Muhammad, with Jesus playing the larger role in the west. Both lived after the Axial Age but stood in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets who were part of it.

What about our imperial period?

The anti-imperial elements of Jesus’s message were taken seriously by the early church, Cobb observes. It taught people to seek goals other than wealth and power, and many early Christians refused military service. But when the empire allied itself with the church, the church changed more than the empire. Cobb sees that change still in effect today. Could we reverse it? Is the church even trying to reverse it?