The Resisting Lord

The Lordship of Jesus stood in complete contradiction to the Lordship of the Roman emperor (as opposed to the supposition that while greater in terms of power and extent, it remained similar in terms of execution). The church had to go through a major transformation over an extended period of time before it was able to appeal to the power of Christ and to the power of the empire simultaneously without experiencing significant tension. A major factor which helped to push the church in this direction was the depoliticization of Paul. As we have already seen, a depoliticized adaptation of the apostle is actually much more dangerous than the explicitly political reality, for a depoliticized Paul unavoidably ends up supporting the empire by default, and that usually without our having been made aware of it. In this section, Rieger is determined to persuade us of the political nature of Paul’s letters, placing the crucifixion of Jesus and His resurrection from the dead front and center in this illuminating argument. What did these two foundational aspects of Paul’s theology communicate to those in positions of power?

Crucifixion was a form of punishment employed by the Romans upon the lower classes; particularly the politically rebellious. It was a political weapon, utilized for the purposes of social control and also as a potent means of breaking the will of the people. It unveiled the seemingly insurmountable power of the empire, as well as the incredible weakness of those who might choose to rise up against it. In placing the crucifixion of Jesus at the core of his theology, Paul was essentially flipping the common imperial sensibilities over on their head. The cross, for Paul, was the purest expression of God’s power. The self-emptying death of Jesus was the unadulterated revelation of God’s justice. The cross unveiled God’s solidarity with the lowly, the despised, and the oppressed. The top-down logic of the Roman empire had been relativized and replaced in light of Jesus’ Lordship. He was pronounced Lord (kyrios), son of God (hyos theo), and even savior. It was He who possessed the true healing powers and who was delivering the gospel (euanggelion). Jesus would institute justice (dikaiosyne) and peace (eirene), beginning in and amongst a small gathering of imperial citizens (ekklesia); who together would mark the commencement of the establishment of colonial outposts (in the midst of Rome!) for the coming empire. Paul was applying the standard imperial rhetoric to the crucified Jesus which could hardly have been viewed as anything other than political resistance!

The resurrection of Jesus also carried with it significant political connotations for Paul. It was first of all the verification of both the reality of Jesus’ Lordship and the cruciform character of His Lordly rule. It held forth the promise of life beyond the period of Roman imperial existence, which obviously meant that it had furthermore implied an eventual end to the Roman empire. It also validated Paul’s egalitarian resistance of hierarchical structures as well as his developing preference for those who dwelt at the margins of society. At this point we must be careful that we do not simply understand Paul to have been establishing a brand new system of hierarchy. His reversal is actually something which continuously subverts itself; at all times and in all places calling the world’s power brokers to account. In addition, we would not want to conclude that this expression of solidarity with society’s humiliated insinuates that God is not (by any means) in solidarity with the rich and the powerful. It would be more precise to say that God’s way of being in solidarity with the strong is through His solidarity with the weak. In conclusion, Paul’s reason for opposing the hierarchical structures of empire had (primarily) to do with the fact that empires were (and are) naturally built upon the backs of the frail. No matter how moral or beneficial things might appear if observing the situation from the top, the reality is that the weight of imperial force will ultimately crush those who live at the bottom.

Lord of the Empire

What did it mean when the early church referred to Jesus as Lord? The Roman emperors laid claim to the title Lord as well. Joerg Rieger believes that this is a significant point and that we should see some sort of correlation between the declaration of Jesus as Lord and the declaration of the Roman emperor as Lord. What is the connection? The title Lord is a political designation and thus the proclamation of Jesus as Lord should be perceived as a subversive claim to the throne of the emperor. To put it in simple terms, it was a way of saying that Jesus was Lord and that the emperor was not. The terminology cannot be confined to the realm of the religious, for as we have already seen, people in the ancient world did not possess a modernist worldview which sought to make unnatural distinctions between the political and the religious. It is also improper to limit the scope of title Lord so as to see it merely as a religious reference to an individual’s personal relationship with Jesus. Lord was a term that carried with it extraordinarily broad implications for the whole of Roman imperial society.

Yet still, what exactly did it mean when the early church referred to Jesus as the Lord? Our author correctly notices the fact that the church throughout history has committed minimal time and effort to the vital cause of defining and describing the qualitative differences between the Lordship of Christ and the Lordship of the emperor. The church has thus failed to recognize the way in which Paul had determined to reveal the true meaning of the designation Lord; by contrasting Jesus with the Roman emperor. As a result, world empires and their emperors have been allowed the occasion to identify with and to appropriate the Lordship of Christ for themselves and for their own causes, and the church has been afforded with an opportunity to affirm and support imperial agendum in the name of Christ. Those who have attempted to relegate the Lordship of Jesus to the sphere of the religious have perhaps committed an even greater act of insidiousness, for this approach incarcerates Jesus in such a way that it actually prevents His Lordship from having any reconstructing impact upon our own understanding of the meaning of the designation, which is typically determined and defined by our experience of the Lordship of the emperor. When viewed correctly as a political act of resistance, Paul’s critique of the Roman emperor (in light of the Lordship of Christ) will serve to redefine the way in which we are to understand the concepts of rule and authority.

Rieger invites us to take a brief look at Philippians 2:5-11; an ancient hymn which actually predates Paul and is likely one of the oldest pieces of the early Christian tradition available to us today. The imperial power of Jesus as Lord is certainly present. Jesus’ power has definite implications for all other powers, in that they apparently surrender their own power to Him, voluntarily agreeing to their own disempowerment. What Rieger hopes that we will focus in on though is the different variety of power that Jesus exercised; a power diametrically opposed to that of the Roman emperor. Jesus employed power by relinquishing it. He denied His own self-interest, divested Himself of all status and privilege, identified Himself with the humiliated and the oppressed, and literally placed himself beneath the dregs of society in order to become their servant. When understood properly as a means of political resistance and subversion, it is evident that the Lordship of Jesus causes the top-to-bottom hierarchical structures upon which empires were and are constructed to collapse. Rieger closes with a reminder that even when imperial hierarchical power structures are employed in order to enforce supposed morality, they stand in blatant contradiction to the manner in which Jesus implemented His Lordship. They are hopelessly geared towards the preservation of top-down powers and economic interests, and not towards the needs and desires of the people.

The Early Church and the Theology of Empire

Jesus and Paul lived during the golden age of the Roman empire. The earliest Christian confessions and references to Jesus developed at a time when the empire was at the peak of its power. Joerg Rieger is concerned to show that it is possible to read the earliest Christian writings that we have access to (the epistles of Paul) as anti-imperial literature, which opens up doors for the possibility of introducing a postcolonial vision for the Christianity of the future. He is initially concerned with detailing the deeply integrated nature of the realms of politics, economics, culture and religion within the life and logic of the empire and its citizens. He credits modern intellectuals with the idea that these spheres of life could (or can) be separated or compartmentalized, but reminds us that this way of thinking would have been entirely foreign to those who lived within an ancient Roman cultural context. It is this incorrect assumption which has created the necessary room for modern interpreters to imagine that Paul was mostly (if not entirely) disinterested in non-religious matters.

Rieger’s important adjustment to our understanding of the ancient world allows us to ask whether or not the writings of the apostle Paul should be read as having been supportive of the imperial status quo, or if we should view his letters as anti-imperial literature designed to interfere with and ultimately subvert (or at least resist) the empire. He argues for the latter by pointing out the way in which Paul directly challenges three of the most powerful instruments of Roman imperial control; the emperor cult, the system of patronage, and the prominent themes of the empire’s rhetoric. He notes that Paul’s attack on these essentially unifying aspects of the Roman empire allowed him the occasion to encrypt his imperial critique without straightforwardly challenging the political rulers of his day, including the emperor himself. Rieger attentively recognizes the fact that Paul’s somewhat illusive or secretive approach has allowed later generations of Christians an opportunity for employing the Pauline literature in support of the existing imperial power structures and hierarchical systems of their own time period. That said, if we are to locate an anti-imperial and political thrust at the heart of the Pauline corpus, we must carefully examine the theological categories which Paul had adopted from his Roman imperial cultural and religious context, and contrast them with those same categories as they would have been understood within the empire itself.

The final preliminary issue that Rieger has chosen to set before our eyes has to do with our need to begin to come to an understanding of the fact that the nature of Paul’s critique against the Roman empire was that it followed a different sort of logic from that of the Christian faith. He asserts that a failure to identify the foundational discrepancies between Paul’s logic and the logic of the empire will inevitably result in the neglecting of a major aspect of Paul’s thought. Not only that, but he also warns that a theology of empire is not always quite so easily recognized as such. In a cultural and political context in which the empire defines logical normalcy, a failure to delineate and resist the empire’s definitions is the equivalent of support of and complicity with the empire. A prime example of this phenomenon is the previously discussed modern assertion that Paul was relatively unconcerned with political issues and almost entirely focused in upon matters of religion. In truth, any theology that claims to be non-political in a highly politicized environment is actually deceiving itself. In other words, claiming to be non-political is itself a political statement, and a position which actually serves to lend justification to the logic and theology of the empire. Paul certainly used ambivalent language, but we need not conclude that this meant that he had perceived himself to have been on politically neutral ground (an impossibility) nor generally supportive of the status quo.