<http://www.amazon.com/God-Empire-Jesus-Against-Rome/dp/0060843233>
Its subject is especially timely in light of the recent dust up over Rev. Wright's strong challenge to media caricatures and Sen. Obama's realpolitik denunciation of his former pastor.
BTW, if you haven't already done so, I suggest you read the full transcript of the Reverend's appearance before the Natl. Press Club:
It's a masterful presentation.
About the Obama/Wright brouhaha, Charles Brown wrote:
...how tragic that Rev. Wright (a follower of Jesus, whose story emphasized forgiveness ) didn't use this opportunity to let his anger go ( he had adequately expressed it and correct criticisms of America), and make a speech on racial reconciliation and forgiveness; take his lead from Obama. Sure it's true that US has had Indian genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, etc. But is there any future in treating racism as permanent? The profound hope of O's campaign is once again dreaming Martin Luther King's dream, without denying history.
[...]
Which, on the face of it, seems reasonable. If you look more closely however, questions arise.
Charles -- like many others -- assumes that Wright's challenge to, and unflinching description of white supremacy and imperial violence comes from little else than "anger". In fact, it's the core of a consistent and well reasoned *liberation theology* response to ongoing forms of oppression. Like Charles, many commentators are saying that Wright, as a follower of Christ, should stop mentioning American sins and, adhering to Sen. Obama's 'vision', focus on 'hope' and 'reconciliation'. (Ironically, many of these newborn theologians are otherwise unconcerned about the finer points of Christian thought).
This is an attractive argument if, for no other reason, because obeying its reasoning would ruffle far fewer feathers. But it's a plea to put a fresh coat of paint on a neglected and decaying building: covering the glaring evidence of trouble without actually fixing a thing.
This is precisely the opposite of the revolutionary message of Jesus which even a secularist such as myself can eagerly applaud. Indeed, as Crossan's "God and Empire..." asserts, Christ's goal was to supplant the brutal Roman world with the 'kingdom of heaven' through peaceful means.
Fundamentalists typically describe this replacement as being achieved via the 'second coming' or the rapture (events which, paradoxically for people who often talk about peace, are enthusiastically anticipated because of the punishing violence thought to accompany them). Crossan argues that Christ was talking about a more earthly, less cosmically explosive, but no less dramatic process: the imperial system was to be undone, step by step, via the unprecedented creation of a new paradigm, centered on love. By its very nature, Christ's vision of mutual aid and submission to one another was a challenge to Roman concepts of harsh competition, martial virtue and 'peace' via war and subjugation (wasn't it Tacitus who said, "where they [Rome] make a desert, they call it peace"?).
Bringing this back to Obama/Wright, we can see that our modern Rome cannot be transformed into something better by whitewashing the truth about its nature. To be faithful to not only Christ's message but his deeper goal, you cannot shrink from calling the invasion of Iraq a crime. You cannot settle for saying, as most people do, that it was merely a 'mistake'. Would Jesus be so careful? The trouble is, when you say 'crime' instead of 'mistake' you're vulnerable to charges of radicalism and wild-eyed anger.
And this is what Rev. Wright has done and why he has been vilified; he has used the word 'crime' where it should be used. He has called 'supremacy by its right name instead of covering it with sugar. During his Natl. Press Club speech, the Reverend said:
<snip>
I call our faith tradition, however, the prophetic tradition of the black church, because I take its origins back past [theologian] Jim Cone, past the sermons and songs of Africans in bondage in the transatlantic slave trade. I take it back past the problem of Western ideology and notions of white supremacy.
I take and trace the theology of the black church back to the prophets in the Hebrew Bible and to its last prophet, in my tradition, the one we call Jesus of Nazareth.
The prophetic tradition of the black church has its roots in Isaiah, the 61st chapter, where God says the prophet is to preach the gospel to the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive. Liberating the captives also liberates who are holding them captive.
It frees the captives and it frees the captors. It frees the oppressed and it frees the oppressors.
The prophetic theology of the black church, during the days of chattel slavery, was a theology of liberation. It was preached to set free those who were held in bondage spiritually, psychologically, and sometimes physically. And it was practiced to set the slaveholders free from the notion that they could define other human beings or confine a soul set free by the power of the gospel.
[...]
and later,
God's desire is for positive, meaningful and permanent change. God does not want one people seeing themselves as superior to other people. God does not want the powerless masses, the poor, the widows, the marginalized, and those underserved by the powerful few to stay locked into sick systems which treat some in the society as being more equal than others in that same society.
God's desire is for positive change, transformation, real change, not cosmetic change, transformation, radical change or a change that makes a permanent difference, transformation. God's desire is for transformation, changed lives, changed minds, changed laws, changed social orders, and changed hearts in a changed world.
This principle of transformation is at the heart of the prophetic theology of the black church. These two foci of liberation and transformation have been at the very core of the black religious experience from the days of David Walker, Harriet Tubman, Richard Allen, Jarena Lee, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, and Sojourner Truth, through the days of Adam Clayton Powell, Ida B. Wells, Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Barbara Jordan, Cornell West, and Fanny Lou Hamer.
[...]
These aren't the words of a man who's trapped by "anger" but rather, the words of a man who is challenging his country to face its actual self, to cast away its cherished mythology of perfection, and move forward.
...
Sen. Obama's objective is to become president of the United States, the nation which to this day remains, to quote Dr. King, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world..." A POTUS' job, stripped of distracting pomp and circumstance, is to act as manager of a vast system of power preservation and expansion. Just as Augustus (who Gibbon called, "that crafty tyrant"), though remaining faithful to the ideas energizing Roman tyranny, was a better, less destructive emperor than Nero, Obama -- if elected -- may yet prove to be a better, and perhaps even less destructive, manager than his competitors.
That's important, and a reasonable rationale for supporting his candidacy. Still, even as we gift Sen. Obama with more benefit of the doubt than his opponents (and this generosity must be interrogated) we should heed Christ's admonition, stated in Matthew 10:16 - "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." (KJV).
Those of us who're calling upon Rev. Wright to be quiet or, at best, to parrot Obama's rhetoric of 'reconciliation' over and above the more thorough, liberation theology vision of 'transformation' are -- whether we realize it or not -- demanding that he split Jesus' advice in two: retaining the dove's harmlessness while losing the serpent's wisdom.
.d.