The Empire Strikes Out
Theologians Pit Christ Against Imperial America
by Mark Tooley
Likening the United States under George W. Bush to the Roman Empire is becoming increasingly popular in some theological circles. The combination of seminary faculty against Bush and recent US military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere has brought together pacifist absolutists with just-war theorists who fret over US foreign policy. For example:
• Anxious About Empire (Brazos Press, 2004), edited by Wesley
Avram of Yale Divinity School, enlisted nearly a dozen theologians and ethicists
to express their angst over an ostensibly hegemonic US foreign policy (with
some notable dissenters, such as Jean Bethke Elshtain).
•
Union Seminary in New York City hosted a two-day conference on this theme
last fall, before the presidential elections. Speakers included Jesus Seminar
stalwarts Hal Taussig and John Dominic Crossan.
•
In a February 8 column for The Christian Century, one of its editors,
John Dart, wrote about the trend, describing the preference of some biblical
scholars to emphasize a Jesus opposed to empire, not only the Rome of his
day but by extension the new American empire of our own day.
A Violent World
Perhaps the most succinct summation of this school of thought among Christian theologians and ethicists is a statement organized late during the 2004 presidential election campaign, and still being circulated and discussed, called Confessing Christ in a World of Violence ( CCWV). It was issued for a time “when its [the church’s] confession is co-opted by militarism and nationalism.”
Carried prominently on the website of Jim Wallis’s magazine Sojourners, it attracted over 200 signers (over 300 are now listed on the website), some of them predictably politically active on the left, including Wallis himself. But other signers are not known for making political statements, and some are best known for their vigorous defense of traditional Christian teachings.
There were politically liberal Evangelicals, like Tony Campolo. There were traditional pacifists, like Myron Augsburger. There was the eclectic contrarian Stanley Hauerwas and his co-author William Willimon. There were left-leaning Roman Catholics, such as Sister Joan Chittister and First Things contributor Gabriel Fackre. There was liberal Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann and popular Eerdmans writer Fleming Rutledge.
There were Lutheran homosexual activist Barbara Lundblad of Union Seminary and popular “emerging church” writer Brian McLaren. There were Christian Marxist Cornel West of Princeton and Jesus Seminar critic and biblical scholar Ben Witherington. There were feminist theologian Sallie McFague and Evangelical theologians Roger Olson of Baylor and Colin Brown of Fuller.
Fuller Theological Seminary provided twenty signers and Duke Divinity School fifteen (with the university’s past and present chaplains adding two more). Luther Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary both contributed twelve, and Baylor University nine. Mennonite institutions offered twenty-nine. Even Wheaton and Gordon Colleges contributed four each.
A chief spokesman and organizer for CCWV was Richard Hays of Duke Divinity School, who is pacifist, theologically orthodox, and a widely respected New Testament scholar who has written extensively and supportively of church teachings against homosexual practice and abortion. Also in the lead with him and Wallis have been Glenn Stassen of Fuller Theological Seminary, famous for his claims that abortion increased under Bush because of his policies, George Hunsinger of Princeton Theological Seminary, and Richard Pierard of Gordon College.
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C.
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