American Politics

The Diggers

ON THE MORNING of April 1, 1649, Gerrard Winstanley arose to obey a direct command from the Holy Spirit. He traveled the Surrey countryside in England until he reached St. George’s Hill, a heath that had been Crown property for centuries. Summoning the full extent of his courage, he plunged a spade into the ground and began digging.

And yet Winstanley wasn’t the only man in England to hear the Lord. William Everard experienced God in a vision and joined Winstanley there in the shrubground. Soon after, nearby men and women came out from their lodgings and began digging. They cleared the shrubbery, its leathery pinks, yellows, and purples, to expose a modest expanse of ground on which they tilled, dug rows, sowed seed, and placed manure. The swiftness and spontaneity of the thing was as dumbstriking as it was perilous, but in their favor was King Charles I’s head having just been chopped off.

Before there was an American Revolution or French Revolution or Russian Revolution, there was the oft-forgotten English Civil War of the 1640s. Charles I had been the most recent stubborn personality to test the Crown against the convulsing powers of Heaven and Earth. For Charles I and his Stuart predecessor, King James I, the divine right of kings was as clear as any doctrine provided within the elegant certainty of the four corners of Holy Scripture. In the books of the kings of Israel, God had always personally chosen its kings. The psalmist referred to kings as gods. Peter the apostle, writing his first epistle from Jerusalem, commanded all Christians to honor the king. His companion, the apostle to the gentiles, went even further. Paul, writing from house arrest in Nero’s shadow, not only echoed Peter but also placed the sword of God’s wrath in the king’s sovereign hand and commanded Christians to obey his every form of levy — taxes, duties, customs, and tributes. So absolute was his authority that even Jesus admitted to Pilate’s power over him having been granted from God.

To question the king, let alone to defy or fix any obstacle before his unchecked power as God’s vessel of righteousness — be it the law, the courts, the Church, the Magna Carta, or the petulant Members of Parliament — was to elevate one’s station above that of Christ the crucified Lord. It was blasphemy. So determined was Charles I to prove his divine sovereignty over Parliament that for nearly a decade he fought an all-out civil war against them at a cost of nearly two hundred thousand lives and hundreds of thousands more livelihoods, including that of Winstanley.

But it was no matter now. With the death of the king at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, radical reformers grew wild through the stubborn permafrost that held the ground following the Norman conquest. None of them, though, were as radical as Winstanley. The fury and glory of God were rattling the ground anew as in the presence of Moses at Sinai, but this new law of freedom was written on the heart. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Guide of All Truth, a new perspective, one in opposition to the prerogative of kings, descended like tongues of fire on him and his fellow Diggers. “Many things were revealed to me which I never read in any books, nor heard from the mouth of any flesh,” Winstanley wrote.

Anticipating opposition, Winstanley published multiple works in defense of his faith, one directed to Oliver Cromwell and another directed to Parliament. “In the beginning of time, God made the Earth,” he wrote. “Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another.” Instead, before there were kings, “the Earth was a common treasury for all.”

That the earth was a common treasury for all was incompatible with the class distinctions inherent in the divine right of kings. Yet it too found support in Scripture, provided one was brave enough to find it. The same Bible that at times seemed to sanction the sovereign place of the king at other times spoke to the contrary. Did not the first king of Israel obtain his station only because the people disobeyed God? Did Christ not teach that it was not the righteous but the pagans who would lord it over one another? Did Christ not teach that the first shall be last and the last shall be first? Was not the example from the Acts of the Apostles that the believers hold all things in common? Did not all people in the beginning descend from a common source? From these points, Winstanley and Everard argued that humanity needed to return to this divine state of equality. Or, as Mary the mother of Jesus broke out in song:

“My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant. . . .

He has brought down rulers from their thrones
and has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.”

Winstanley took his doctrine to St. George’s Hill with same confidence that Charles I took the divine right of kings to his execution. The Diggers, as their detractors called them, prepared the ground for an abundant harvest of righteousness, corn, beans, and carrots. And word of the enterprise spread. Before long, other Digger colonies rose up throughout the English countryside. In Cobham, for example, eleven acres were cleared out and six common houses were constructed.

Unfortunately for the Diggers, neighboring landlords also wanted the land. And even more desperately, their tenants not having it. And even more desperately, not even think about having it. Oliver Cromwell, victor of the English Civil War, understood the stakes: “What is the purport of [the Diggers] but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord. I was by birth a gentleman. You must cut these people in pieces or they will cut you in pieces.” Cut them to pieces they did. Armed men were dispatched to quickly end them. They were beaten and their lodgings, rows, crops, tools, and books were destroyed. Within a year, all Digger communities in England had been wiped out and many Diggers imprisoned.

William Everard was arrested for his blasphemous opinions “as to deny God, and Christ, and Scriptures.” Of course, by “Scriptures” what was really meant was one particular reading of them. Everard’s arrest prompted Gerrard Winstanley to publish Truth Lifting up the Head above Scandals, in which he argued that Scripture, on which traditional authority rested, was unsafe because there were no undisputed texts, translations, or interpretations. Winstanley concluded that authority should be based in the Spirit. “All people carried the spirit, and thus their own authority, within them,” he wrote.

In September 1650, Winstanley was arrested and charged on suspicion of being a “Sorcerer or Witch.” He was sentenced to insanity and was sent to Bethel Hospital, where it is believed he died in March 1659. However, prior to his death, he had become involved in a burgeoning movement of friends who were said to quake and tremble at the Word of the Lord.

THE RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS permit no formal clergy, and congregants sit in silence until the the Spirit moves them to speak. The Quakers, as they are more commonly known, assent to the priesthood of all believers — or, as they say, obedience to one’s “inner light.” In 1676, Alice Curwen obeyed her inner light after hearing God tell her to leave her meetings in Baycliff, England and travel to the New World. Conditions for the Quakers there were as perilous as on St. George’s Hill. Four members of the Society of Friends in Boston had been just been condemned to lynching. Quakers were imprisoned, beaten, and had their property confiscated. So great was the danger that her husband disputed that the voice she heard was God’s. Nevertheless, she obeyed her inner light rather than her husband and became a Quaker preacher in Barbados, which King James I had made part of the British Empire just decades prior.

Barbados was a titanic exporter of sugar and importer of slave labor. For the benefit of properly sweetened cakes and pastries in London, the bodies of men, women, and children from Africa were seized and shackled by the tens of thousands for months’ long journeys across the Atlantic to plantations where any lingering trace of humanity that — against all odds — may have endured the dark and sickening hull of the vessel would fully and finally be stripped away by the Barbados Slave Code of 1661. A white slave master could punish his slave however he saw fit if doing so seemed beneficial to the operation. That was the law.

By the time Curwen arrived on the island, there were between fifteen and twenty enslaved persons for each free person. Upon seeing the cruelty, the first words of Jesus’s first sermon came to her, illuminating the purpose of her sojourn: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Curwen preached that it was intolerable that her fellow Quakers permit these words to be read aloud in the presence of slave masters, but forbid their hearing among those whom they had enslaved. Even as the Quakers preached for simplicity and against all sorts of hierarchies, they had their blind spots. And so, she demanded of her Friends that they live up to their own ideals — that they permit all persons to the table of the Lord. As she preached in 1677: “I am persuaded, that if they whom thou call’st thy Slaves, be Upright-hearted to God, the Lord God Almighty will set them Free in a way that thou knowest not.”

For Curwen, fidelity to the light within her meant advocating a universal message of freedom. To that end, she spent her time on the island advocating against the Slave Code, which came at the eventual cost of imprisonment. Like Winstanley, she never lived to see the fruits of her labor, but her words and passion continued on.

BENJAMIN LAY stood barely above four feet, though his severely hunched back rendered him even shorter. He likened himself to “little David,” the shepherd boy who slew Goliath. Like Curwen, Lay was a Quaker who had moved from England to Barbados and obeyed the light within him at great personal cost.

In the years that ensued after Curwen preached against Barbados’s taskmasters, the island became even more impossibly cruel. Lay was working there as a shopkeeper when he witnessed an enslaved man kill himself rather than submit to another round of whipping under the Barbados Slave Code, a sight that haunted him for the rest of his life. Though not formally educated, Lay was a student of the previous century’s resistance movements, including the Diggers.

In several written works, which Benjamin Franklin helped him publish, Lay lamented how enslaved people would “plow, sow, thresh, winnow, split Rails, cut Wood, clear Land, make Ditches and Fences, fodder Cattle, run and fetch up the Horses,” for the “lazy Ungodly bellies” of their masters — his fellow Friends. Even worse, when their owners would pass away, they would be left to “proud, Dainty, Lazy, Scornful, Tyrannical and often beggarly Children for them to Domineer.” Such persons he called “the spawn of Satan.”

“‘Every good tree bringeth good fruit, but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.’ Is there any eviler fruit in the world than slave-keeping — anything more devilish? It is of the very nature of hell itself, and is the belly of hell. A good tree cannot bring forth such curse evil fruit as slave-trading.”

And he took these words with him on the sojourner’s road; Benjamin Lay would not permit any meetinghouse in America to enjoy peace. As his fellow congregants sat in their contemplative silence, Lay stood up and cast blistering judgments on them for their indifference to or even participation in the abominable slave trade. He conjured up images of the dark abyss, the lake of fire, and the teeth of the dragon that would feed on the unrighteous who were cast down there. After he was kicked out of every meetinghouse in Barbados, he moved to New Jersey. After he was kicked out of every meetinghouse in New Jersey, he moved to Pennsylvania. Each time, of course, shaking the dust off himself as a testimony against them.

Benjamin Lay soon came to realize that one of the chief obstacles to abolition was in fact Holy Scripture. Any time he engaged in one of his imprecatory theatrics, it wouldn’t be long before someone in the congregation would point out its failure to cast damnation on the slave trade and the notable instances in which it even seemed to condone it.

Lay had none of it. On one occasion, he entered a meetinghouse in New Jersey dressed in a large coat. Before the meeting began, he had placed an animal bladder full of red fruit juice within a hidden compartment he had cut out within his large Bible. When his turn came to speak, the four-foot giant raised the Bible above his head, pulled out a sword from inside his coat, and stabbed the Bible. The congregation went into shock as what appeared to be blood shot out and splattered everyone nearby. The scene around him was explosive, but Lay just sat back down in calm, contemplative Quaker silence and waited to be expelled once again.

The point, which he inherited from Winstanley and Curwen, was clear. As the prophet Jeremiah had spoken to the remnant of Israel thousands of years before, the only reliable doctrine was that which the Holy Spirit had written directly on the hearts of humanity. During his ministry, Jesus placed only one limit on the authority and regulation of the Holy Spirit — like the wind, “it blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it is going.” Of course, that is no limit at all. The very scriptures upon which his opponents relied to justify the status quo themselves declared the Holy Spirit to be a wild thing, and above the Spirit, there was no authority on Earth or in Heaven.

On one occasion, after another of his eccentric displays of guerrilla theater in a Quaker meeting, he was picked up and tossed outside to a thundering rainstorm. Undaunted, he lay down in the mud directly in front of the door, thus requiring that each person who wished to leave step over his body. On another occasion, he stood in the freezing cold without a coat outside the gateway to the meetinghouse. He took one of his shoes off, placed it directly in the snow, and stood there in definance. When the exasperated congregants urged him to take his foot out of the snow, he replied, “Ah, you pretend compassion for me but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half clad.” Lay was a wild man possessed by a wild Spirit that, like the wind, blew wherever it would.

But, like Winstanley and Curwen, he too was an exile. After finally being absolutely renounced by the Religious Society of Friends, he retired to the Pennsylvania countryside where he lived the rest of his days in a cave. He became a vegetarian and ate only that which he personally grew from his own labor. He also made his own clothes. Because he believed that the divine presence of God was in all living creatures, he determined to avoid anything that depended on exploiting others.

By 1757, Lay had reached the age of 75, and his health began to decline. He had witnessed no progress in the cause for which he had dedicated nearly the entirety of his adult life.

Nearly two thousand years before the thought of forming a commune on St. George’s Hill had occurred in the wildest imaginations of anyone, an anonymous writer told of a group of forty-eight Christians who were condemned to torture and death at the beginning of games in the Roman amphitheater in what is today Lyon, France. Among their number was a slave girl named Blandina. When the ancient writer, Eusebius, used this letter to write about this event in his own history of the church, he wrote about her more than anyone else who was tortured that day.

Rome’s cruel society stratified itself sharply and explicitly by classes of persons, and its economy was completely dependent on slave labor. Roman slavery consisted of all races, genders, and ages. A judge could order a person into slavery to satisfy an unpaid debt or as punishment for a crime. Slavery was also a product of Rome’s war economy. Slave dealers would follow the army, and soldiers would sell enemy combatants to them, who would then sell them in one of Rome’s astoundingly large slave markets.

In contrast, the early Christian movement, which Nero had outlawed during his reign, was a radically egalitarian and anti-killing movement. As Paul wrote to the Galatians, within the church “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, nor male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” As such, the early church consisted in large part of enslaved persons, and the upper classes of Roman society viewed them with intense derision. The Roman philosopher, Celsus, wrote that their number consisted primarily of “foolish and low individuals, persons devoid of perception, slaves, and women.”

Rome delegated to local governors the task of punishing those who had been found guilty of the crime of acknowledging Christ as lord rather than acknowledging the emperor as such. During the reign of Trajan, Governor Pliny asked Trajan to instruct him how to conduct the trial of a Christian slave woman who was a deaconess in a local church. Trajan responded that he should have her tortured and, unless she cursed Christ and made an incense offering before a bust of the emperor, condemned to death.

Such was the fate of many early Christians, each of whom lived their days trapped under the pressure of the Roman superstate. Given their position, the debates they considered most relevant were different than the ones we might wish they had had. Specifically, instead of debating the morality of slavery, an institution over which they exercised no political power, their earliest debates centered on the nature of Christ—specifically whether he really had a body or whether he just appeared to have one. To some, the idea that the God who created all the cosmos could come to Earth and suffer at the hands of the Romans and their gods was embarrassing.

Nevertheless, the orthodox view that developed over the course of three centuries was that Christ their lord had a real body and in it suffered real pain on a Roman cross and in his resurrection continued to suffer with them in the Roman arena. In their baptism and in their communion, they joined the body of the church and the body of Christ, a body in which the suffering of one would be felt by all. Christ was not above suffering, but went down with them into the depths of it. From this lens, it should not be surprising that they took Jesus’s teaching quite literally about the judgment of the righteous and the unrighteous: Whatever you did unto the least of these, you did unto me.

And so, when the body of Blandina was seared in a fiery hot cage, all for the entertainment of a cheering crowd, the anonymous individual from Lyon wrote that her fellow martyrs in the arena observed her face transfigure until she took on that of the crucified Christ.

Benjamin Lay was in what would ultimately be his deathbed, when a visitor brought him news. Having long been permanently expelled from Quaker meetinghouses, he had been living a life of solitude. Unbeknownst to him, however, the Spirit that decades prior had inspired him to stab a Bible continued to blow in the Quaker communities, inspiring the children of the men and women who had rejected him. And children, by default, are wiser than their parents.

While he was in solitude, a new generation had risen up to carry on his work. Notably among them were John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, and John Cooper. These new reformers successfully convinced the Society of Friends to undertake an internal purification in order to appease the wrath of God. Specifically, what they committed themselves to was the abolition of slavery. Upon hearing the news, Lay remained silent for a while. He had not run his life aimlessly, nor fought like a boxer beating the air. He had run the race for an eternal prize, beaten his body and made it a slave for an eternal crown. But his efforts had been frustrated at every turn and left him all alone.

“I can now die in peace,” he whispered. His death came just months later.

In subsequent decades, the Quakers outlawed slavery within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Their work was instrumental to Parliament’s abolishing slavery within the British Empire. They petitioned George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to outlaw slavery within the United States. While they did not succeed with them, they were some of the most active participants in the Underground Railroad, much to the displeasure of Washington and Jefferson.

We take for granted the categorical immorality of slavery, but for thousands of years almost no one took this for granted. People understood slavery to be a natural and unavoidable thing like an illness or bad weather. Students of the Bible were as blind to its immorality as anyone else. To my mind, this is why the radical work of Winstanley, Curwen, and Lay must continue — even as an act of religious faith. As previous generations struggled with old conceptions and categories of freedom and unfreedom, new generations will need to struggle with new ones. In the absence of that struggle, we will confuse immoral causes of unfreedom with nature. Even worse, we will use the Bible, even in good faith, as cover for our actions.

In particular, if the Church — particularly the white church of America — wants to be serious about the gospel that sets the oppressed free, it will require more rigorous thinking on issues of power dynamics. In other words, what is freedom without the power to exercise it? Are you free when a major health event plunges you and your family into financial insolvency? Are people of all races free to obtain employment without the power of anti-discrimination laws? They certainly weren’t for a century. Are you free when a disability prevents you from entering most buildings? What about children whose cognitive developments have been stunted by industrial chemicals that contaminate their drinking water? The polluters enjoy great freedom, but do the children who live downstream from the polluters? Are you free to demand fair compensation from a large employer in the absence of the power of workers to collectively bargain? Are you free to eat healthier food when doing so means you will miss a utility bill? Is that a real choice? Are you free to start a business when leaving your employment will discontinue the health insurance upon which you rely? Is that a real choice? Are you free to build up a life savings when Wall Street is free to plunge it into the ground? Are you free when the education on which your profession depends requires that you go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt? When you finish school, do you really have the power to chart your own course? Does the freedom to vote carry real power when politicians choose their voters? Is the freedom to vote meaningful to a single parent who cannot wait in line at the polling station for six hours? Freedom and power are not different things.

In the absence of a new generation of Diggers, stubborn and wild people who force us to view these power discrepancies, our descendants will look back on us and wonder how we could be so immoral.

Hagar, Prophetess to Trump’s America

When the Hebrew people were released from a half century of slavery in Babylon, they came back to the land of Judah. Having seen the great power of the ancient world for the lie that it really was, they took their collective trauma and channeled it into creating a society and a literary vocabulary through which oppressed people the world over would for thousands of years express their hope and pain. To distinguish themselves from their former oppressors, the Hebrews told and wrote down great stories. These stories imagined things that no one had imagined before.

And I want to talk about one of them.

This story begins with a man named Abram. Abram is a resident of the land of Babylon (an important detail to people who’d just been liberated from that land). Abram is wealthy. He owns flocks and herds and he owns slaves. Whoever first told the story probably was owned by a man like this man.

But then God speaks to Abram.

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your family and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.

Genesis c12

Take a moment to appreciate the gravity of what this storyteller is arguing. To be a great nation had a formula. To be a great nation was to rule like Babylon. To administer like Babylon. To think like Babylon. It was to accumulate power and exploit those with less power. And this author comes along and tells the freed slaves that there is a way of being a great nation that they haven’t seen yet.

Abram leaves his former home but soon is presented with a conflict. Pay attention to this conflict because it is the same great conflict at the heart of the entire Bible—between the limited imagination of imperial, great-power thinking and the expanded, faith-based imagination of what the Bible will later call the “kingdom of God.” As the storyteller explains, God has promised Abram that he will be the father of a great nation, which is nice, but his wife, Sarai, is incapable of becoming pregnant. And Abram reasons that you can’t be the father of a nation if you can’t produce offspring.

So the story tells us that Abram resorts to the same thing that the first hearers of the story had just experienced in Babylon—Abram exploits one of his family slaves and conceives of a son through her. Once she has conceived, however, she is no longer useful to Abram and Sarai. Worse, she has just taken Sarai’s place of honor in this time when women’s value to society came from birthing children. The slave girl’s body has been exploited, but when she is no longer useful Sarai despises her and treats her harshly. The slave girl flees into the wilderness, where she cries out to God. Any Babylonian listening so far would praise Abram and Sarai for having prudently administered the resources of their estate, but this storyteller is not interested in blessing the Babylonian taskmasters.

First, the storyteller doesn’t want us to think of the slaves as a category, but as people. We are told the slave girl’s name. It is Ha’Gar. We are told her son’s name. It is Yishma’el. They are people and they have names and, as I will explain shortly, those names mean a lot.

Next, Ha’Gar is weeping in the wilderness when God tells her that her cry is heard. God changes Abram’s name to Abraham (“father of many”) and commands him to accept Ha’Gar and Ishmael as full members of his household. And to fulfill his promise that Abraham would be the father of a great nation, he causes Sarai to have a son after all. It is through this son that the nation of Abraham will become great. Let’s go back to the storyteller.

What is he telling us?

He is telling us what we should be thinking about when we think about what makes nations great. This storyteller wants the former slaves to imagine a society built not on exploiting other people’s bodies, but on hearing the cries of society’s most powerless. Abram would not get his great nation by using a slave, but by having faith in a power that Babylon could not comprehend.

And this should get your attention: when the Hebrew former slaves eventually formed their legal system, their imaginations were clearly influenced by the storyteller of Abram and Ha’Gar.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and Ha’Gar: I am the Lord your God.

When Ha’Gar resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress Ha’Gar. Ha’Gar who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love Ha’Gar as yourself. I am the Lord your God.

Leviticus c19

Ha’Gar is a Hebrew word that means “the alien.”

By the time that all the Bible men in my formative years had given me all their Bible knowledge, I never was taught this. Actually, what I got from these Christian soldiers was the opposite.

When Donald Trump spent the whole of President Obama’s time in office accusing him of a being a secret Muslim born in Kenya, the people who taught me from the Bible for three decades did not form a prophetic witness against the president for his race-bating and xenophobia.

They said “finally, a man who tells it like it is.”

When Donald Trump announced that he would call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” my wise elders did not call on our president to repent in sackcloth and ashes.

They saturated their Facebook walls in the most unaccountable conspiracy theories about Islam.

When Trump signed his first travel ban, Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States, and he said “We all know what that means”, my earliest tutors of the Word did not leave the White House and shake the dust off their sandals.

They worshipped and sang “Make America Like Babylon Again.”

This matters. Because this weekend, the rhetoric of the murderer in New Zealand was not very different from the email chains that having been circulating in our churches for decades. They are the messages of Babylon but clothed in the cover of the Bible. They are messages of manufactured fear disguised as “truth telling.” And as this man who peddled in this same online ecosystem pronounced death on the bodies of fifty sons of Ishmael in New Zealand, God heard the voices of those we despised and treated harshly.

Yishma’el means “heard by God.”

The Islamic faith traces its origins to Ishmael, and among the billion people who adhere to this great Abrahamic tradition, there is less than about a tenth of one percent who read their text and hear the call to violence. Language that can be heard as a call to violence is in the Koran if one wants to find it there, just as language that can be heard as a call to violence is in the Bible if one—like the killer in New Zealand—wants to find it there. But, like most Christians, Islamic adherents don’t hear a call to violence. They are humans just like you and me.

So when you participate in speech that categorically dehumanizes the billions of adherents of any one of the great Abrahamic traditions—as if their Abrahamic tradition has troubling scriptures, but yours doesn’t—you lay the groundwork for the very terrorism that consumes your imagination. And Jesus Christ prophesies hand-in-hand with Ha’Gar that our destruction is near.

Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was Ha’Gar and you did not invite me in.

Matthew c25

Reading the Bible with Caesar

While they were searching for Paul and Silas to bring them out to the assembly, they attacked Jason’s house. When they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some believers before the rulers, shouting, “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has entertained them as guests. They are all acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus.” The people and the rulers were disturbed when they heard this.

Acts c17

Every person who reads the Bible must interpret the Bible. If you want to tell me how you “just read the Bible for what it says”, I will smile and ask about all the property you sold to give to the poor.

When liberal Christians (or as I prefer, “Christians”) talk about how we interpret the Bible, we commonly use a shorthand, “reading with Jesus.” Implicit in this phrase is an admission that some parts of the Bible are on their face horrific, and we need a standard by which to determine what things we hold and what things we let go. We acknowledge the literary tradition through which the ancient Hebrew people distinguished and preserved their ethnic and national identity, and we preserve them—warts and all—because they are foundational to understanding Jesus’s colorful and subversive teachings as a Jewish rabbi. However, we also hold that the many, many, many parts of the Bible are not equals and anything that contradicts what Jesus taught takes a backseat.

I like the phrase, “reading with Jesus,” but I also have problems with it. For one thing, it’s too safe. It doesn’t offend the sorts of people who need to be offended. It continues a tendency of progressive Christians to try and sound to fundamentalists like we have a lot in common—when really we don’t at all. If I write something on here and it doesn’t fill my inbox with the rants of angry, right-wing, conservative, fundamentalist Christians, I usually feel like I’ve just wasted a whole lot of time.

More importantly, because it’s just a shorthand, it doesn’t actually mean anything unless you’re familiar with the intellectual giants whose work it summarizes. When I lived in Evangelical Fundamentalist World— and was made to believe that Tim Keller, Francis Chan, and Lee Strobel had important things to say—the phrase Reading with Jesus would have done nothing to stretch my imagination. I would have “read the Bible with Jesus” and then just remained one of the millions of believers who are of no concern to the “principalities and powers”—those against whom the Bible demonstrates its greatest and most timeless literary genius. This is no accident. It’s the result of billions of dollars that have shaped the readings of the people who taught the people who taught the people who taught your Vacation Bible School. The Gospel of John screams this at you when the post-resurrection Jesus resembled a gardner rather than a messianic warrior, and the writer tells you that no one recognized him.

To avoid reading our own biases into the Bible and calling it Reading with Jesus, we need to do the work of creating a defensible reference point, and I wrote this essay because there’s a simple but intellectually rigorous framework for doing that work.

Before you read the Bible with Jesus, you need to read the Bible with Caesar.

Sit across the table with Augustus. Hike through the forest with Domitian. Invite Nebuchadnezzar to your Bible study group. Go on a retreat led by Pharaoh. Meditate with Alexander the Great. Listen to the prayers of Nero and Caligula. Ask each of these powerful men how they would like you to read the Bible.

And then do the opposite.

Because in the four decades before Jesus was born, the Roman Senate and the court poets referred to Augustus Caesar as the Son of God and Our Lord and Savior. Throughout his empire, he established propaganda centers for the imperial gods called churches. When his army brutally occupied a new territory he announced his victory through messages that were called Gospels. The words son of God, savior, Lord, gospel, and church are Bible words that will always carry some degree of mystery and artistry. But if you asked Jesus what he meant by them in any concrete sense, he could point to the Roman empire and say “well definitely not that.”

Christians used these words in rebellion. To say Jesus is Lord was dangerous and unpatriotic, because it unmistakably communicated and Caesar is not. To proclaim the Gospel of Jesus was to deny the Gospel of Rome. The rebelliousness of the church was the same rebelliousness inherent in the Jewish religion—a religion that came into being on the underside of economic, religious, and violent power. To read with Jesus means to read about the world turning upside down, and the Caesars never want that.

So, with all this as a backdrop, lets talk about that. How would Caesar want you to read the Bible? If you’re an American, the answer is: probably how you already do.

Don’t Let It Be Too Political

The Bible concerns itself with structural economic justice from beginning to end, but discuss this ultra-biblical topic with any Christian fundamentalist and you will reflexively be warned that we shouldn’t let the Bible get too political. This is not the voice of Jesus, but of Caesar.

When you read the Bible in opposition to Caesar, Jesus’s well-known Beatitudes are rightly recognized as the constitution of the kingdom of God. When Jesus proclaimed “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of Heaven” his message was not that it is good for you to be poor in spirit, so you can go to Heaven. His message was that in the “kingdom” (or government) of God, which was coming down to Earth, those who had lost all hope under the weight of Caesar would now find blessing. The government of God was for them. When Jesus proclaimed “blessed are those who mourn”, his message was not that it is bad to be happy. His message was that in the government of God, those upon whom Caesar’s power had trampled would find comfort. You cannot put Jesus in the context of his Jewish literary tradition and read it any other way.

For Jesus’s favorite self designation was the “Son of Man”, a phrase that came from the centuries-old Jewish Book of Daniel. In the story, Daniel sees a vision of all of the world’s empires—which he sees as “beasts”—and they are stripped of their power and worship “one like a son of man.” Nobody in the story dies and goes to Heaven. Nobody leaves the Earth. In Daniel’s vision, the kingdom of Heaven comes to them. And Jesus changed that tradition in no way. As he said further in his kingdom constitution, “blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth.”

And I could just keep going. After the story of the Hebrews being freed from Egypt and from being just a source of cheap labor for Pharaoh’s great projects (how can you say this isn’t political???), they go out into the wilderness and God gives them a legal code that contains one welfare program after another. What’s striking to me about almost all of the Torah is how little of it would apply to all but the most wealthy of its adherents. And to take it further, God required that all of the Torah’s welfare programs benefit Israel’s immigrants.

Whether it was Pharaoh and his magicians being overcome by a nomadic shepherd and his staff, or the King in Nineveh hearing the worst sermon in the whole Bible and repenting in sackcloth and ashes, or King Nebuchadnezzar boasting about his power before losing his mind like a wild animal, the writers of the Jewish canon loved to tell incongruent and subversive stories that in various ways showed God humiliating the seeming invincibility of the world’s oppressive systems. The resurrection of Jesus after being killed by the execution device of the Roman empire comes straight out of this tradition. The Apostle Paul expressed this when he wrote “and having disarmed the powers and authorities, Jesus made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”

We Americans have been scripted to read our Bibles and not think about what they mean for our systems. We apply our Bibles to what we do individually, but leave our systems intact. The American system for allocating resources is competition. You get things by being a winner (or by being born to the winners). We conceptualize most things in terms of what is mine and what is yours. Our identities consist of neat boundaries that protect my actions from having anything to do with you or anyone else. We don’t talk about “walking with the Lord” in any context other than our own private moral conduct. Private moral conduct is good, but if your nation’s systems do not bless the least among it, your nation has not inherited the kingdom of God. In the same way, a personal relationship with God is good, and I hope you have one, but Caesar would love for you to keep it there. He would love it if at the end of your Bible study, you, like Caiaphas, proclaim “we have no king but Caesar.”

Make It Only About Spiritual Things

The Bible is a spiritual book, and Caesar would love to keep it that way. But never does the Bible situate the spiritual world in one place and the physical in another. In the Bible, these two realms are always in direct contact.

In the creation poem of Genesis c1, the spirit of God was there in the creation and God called it good.

In the story of Jesus’s baptism, the spirit of God came on the body of Jesus right before Luke used a genealogy to argue that Jesus was recreating the same world that God called good (go read that genealogy in Luke c4 again).

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he didn’t instruct them to pray that we would all—as Plato taught—leave the Earth for some airy spiritual paradise in Heaven. He taught his disciples to pray that God’s kingdom in Heaven come to the sweat and soil of the Earth.

In the story of the Exodus from Egypt, Moses brought the Israelites out of Pharoah’s economic system of slavery, and into the wilderness where they saw the “glory of the Lord.” And what was that glory?

Bread.

Not just bread, but freedom from Pharaoh’s system of cheap labor. Bread from outside the imaginations that Pharaoh sought to control. Bread that reduced his power to nothing.

Real spirituality concerns itself with tangible things. Like bread. Like segregated school districts. Access to healthcare. Affordable housing. Carbon emissions. Employment discrimination. Consumer protection. Rehabilitation for those who commit crimes. Peacemaking.

But a spirituality that sings songs on Sundays and then just floats off into the clouds is no threat to Caesar or Pharaoh, and it is how they will teach you to read the Bible. They are thrilled when they profit from systems that exploit vulnerable people and then the Christians come and tell everyone to just focus on getting to Heaven.

Make It All About the Afterlife

Speaking of Heaven, Rome did not persecute the early Christians because of anything having to do with the afterlife. This comes as a surprise to the modern fundamentalist Christian, but Rome allowed the people it subjugated to continue their religious traditions. In fact, Rome was famous for adopting the gods of people it conquered. As long as you worshipped the Caesars and the important gods of the empire, the Roman authorities did not care that you also worshipped another god or gods. The Romans especially did not have a well-developed theology of an afterlife, so people were completely free to preach about that.

(Almost none of your Bible is concerned with the afterlife either, but I’ve already written on this.)

I find it compelling then that, in spite of this religious tolerance, Rome found adherents of Judaism and Christianity so especially threatening. When Christians were identified, they were imprisoned and hauled into arenas to be mauled by wild animals. The Roman state depended on exploiting vulnerable people, but the Christians preached a different way of seeing the world. They acknowledged no distinction between slave and senator. They would not participate in any government ministry that required killing people.

Here’s a letter from the Governor Pliny to the Emperor Trajan in the early 2nd century:

This is what I have done with those who have been brought before me as Christians. First, I asked them whether they were Christians or not. If they confessed that they were Christians, I asked them again, and a third time, intermixing threatenings with the questions. If they persevered in their confession, I ordered them to be executed. . . .

Those who denied that they were or had been Christians and called upon the gods with the usual formula, reciting the words after me, and those who offered incense and wine before your image — which I had ordered to be brought forward for this purpose, along with the regular statues of the gods — all such I considered acquitted — especially as they cursed the name of Christ, which it is said bona fide Christians cannot be induced to do. . . .

There are among them every age, of every rank, and of both sexes.

Nowhere in this letter, or in Trajan’s response, or in anything the Roman ever wrote about the Christians, does the topic of the afterlife come up. For this reason, Caesar would love for you to make the Bible an instruction manual to get to Heaven after you die. What he will not tolerate is you turning the world upside down. For that he will take your life.

And if Caesar wants to take your life, you’re probably reading the Bible with Jesus.

Jesus Probably* Wasn’t Pro-Life**

The modern person would scarcely recognize the political landscape of 1979, the year when Paul Weyrich is said to have first met with Jerry Falwell.

Polling in the 1960s consistently revealed that most Americans believed abortion should be legal in most cases and that the issue, if anything, was a women’s health issue. This was true among people you wouldn’t expect. Abortion access was liberalized in such conservative states as North Carolina in 1967, Georgia in 1968, Kansas in 1969, Arkansas in 1969, Virginia in 1970, and South Carolina in 1970.

This was consistent with the conservative faith institutions that constituted the majority of these states. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” Two years later, a 7-2 majority of the United States Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade held that a woman has a right to an abortion until the third trimester of her pregnancy. The decision went mostly unnoticed. In fact, after Roe was decided the Southern Baptist Convention in 1974 reaffirmed its 1971 position and reaffirmed it again in 1976. W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s president, went on the record saying, “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

This probably strikes you as complete bonkers.

There was a time when the issue was not so atomic. In fact, and perhaps even more surprising, the states that most resisted liberalizing abortion access were the northeastern states—those same states that today overwhelmingly elect pro-choice candidates. What held these states back in that time was that they were overwhelmingly Catholic.

Obviously the political landscape is different today, but you as a modern citizen need to understand why. There’s a lot of history and a lot of money and a lot of cynicism behind why this issue went from mildly controversial at best to the single defining issue in American politics. I find the story nothing short of disturbing.

First, I’m going to explain what happened. The story is well-documented in the historical record. Second, I’m going to talk about how Jesus probably* viewed the issue. I think both parts of this essay are going to surprise you.

A Cynical Beginning

Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which held that racial segregation of public schools violates the United States Constitution, and following President Eisenhower’s enlistment of the National Guard to enforce the decision, church-run schools proliferated throughout the American South in the 1960s. These schools ensured that white families would not have to send their children to schools that admitted non-white children. The practice was so pervasive that they earned the name “segregation academies.”

The 1960s was also a time when most of the think tanks and advocacy organizations that made up Washington D.C. leaned liberal—think school desegregation. But the ethos of the American South really began its systematic infiltration of Washington in 1970, when the IRS issued Revenue Rule 71-447, which revoked exempt status for private schools that discriminated on the basis of race. Major funding for conservative causes and organizations skyrocketed after this decision. In this new environment that was suddenly flush with interested conservative cash, Paul Weyrich in 1973 co-founded the Heritage Foundation, which devoted itself to free enterprise, limited government, and a strong national defense. While its backers were almost entirely large commercial interests, Weyrich had an idea that would distinguish his organization from the few other conservative organizations.

Even though, as I said earlier, liberal organizations far outnumbered conservative organizations at this time, the Heritage Foundation was not completely alone. By 1973, the American Enterprise Institute had been around for more than three decades and had fiercely, but with little to show for it, opposed FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s and 40s, Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, and Nixon’s Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act of 1970.

Where Paul Weyrich and his the Heritage Foundation differed from other anti-government organizations was their targeting of the long politically dormant evangelical Christian community to form a voting bloc with whom they could shoehorn conservative social issues with their otherwise unpopular pro-big-business causes. At first these efforts were unsuccessful. Weyrich tried a whole host of issues—pornography was one—but nothing seemed to fire them up enough to consolidate a voting bloc.

That is until the Catholic, Paul Weyrich, met with the megachurch Baptist preacher, Jerry Falwell, and convinced Falwell to steer evangelicals to politics and specifically to the issue of abortion.

The idea was that if, instead of framing the issue as when does science tell us that life begins, the issue could be framed as godless liberal feminists just want to be able to kill babies so they can have more sex and we have to stop them, ordinary people could be manipulated to support any politician as long as they prayed to God and saluted the flag and were on the right side of the should-we-be-able-to-kill-babies question.

And it worked brilliantly.

Indeed, were there some group out there advocating to kill babies, I would agree that a political movement would need to consolidate against them. It would dramatically change my priorities. It would influence which sources I trusted. If the smart people in the we-shouldn’t-kill-babies group advocated tax cuts for the wealthy, I would support tax cuts for the wealthy. If they told me that climate change is a hoax, I would believe it was a hoax. If they delivered an alert to my television screen every time some non-white person committed a crime in a downtown setting, I would live far away in the suburbs and put my children in private schools. There are many reasons why fetuses should be deemed a human life sometime after conception, but because conservatives have been trained for so long to equate pro choice with anti life, our society is divided into two groups who increasingly cannot speak to each other. No matter how much science and data and decency might be found in some good idea, if it comes from the baby killing group, it would be inherently suspect.

What you’ve just read was the impetus behind the Moral Majority, the 1979 brainchild of Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell, the key mobilizing force of evangelical Christians beginning in the 1980s, and almost everything you hate about politics in 2018. If you want to understand why 81% of white evangelical Christians cast their vote for the President of the United States of America on a guy who bragged about regularly sexually assaulting women, you need to understand that most of them believe they are the last humans on earth who care about human life. Donald Trump, however flawed, had promised them early and often that he would give them their long-sought fifth anti-Roe vote on the United States Supreme Court.

And he delivered.

Jesus?

Just because the modern pro-life movement owes its beginning to such cynicism does not per se make it wrong. I too cast my party-line votes each election cycle for candidates whose true motivations I will never know. I do this because they vote for policies that I believe further my values. My values are formed from many sources, but chief among them is my confession that Jesus is Lord.

So, what did Jesus think?

Can we know that?

Actually, we can—and with more certainty than you might think.

But first we need to untangle a few things, starting with the Bible. When modern Christians gird themselves in the armor of God and unsheathe their sword of the word, the scriptures they usually fling around are Psalm c139 v13, Jeremiah c1 v5, or Isaiah c44 v24. Each of these verses have in common the idea of Yahweh knowing humans so intimately that they are known even before they are born. To express this idea, each writer uses language that can be translated from the Hebrew as having been known “in the womb.”

Which is why I find it so interesting that 83% of Jews—who for thousands of years have shared these biblical sources along with Christian believers in Yahweh—believe that in all or most cases abortion should be legal. No doubt, that most modern Jews disagree on an issue with modern evangelicals doesn’t prove anything, but it certainly demands interest. Jews and modern evangelical Christians share so much scripture and yet disagree so profoundly on this issue. Considering that Christians go to the Old Testament for 100% of their proof texts against abortion, I think it intellectually dishonest not to wonder why Jews see the issue so differently.

For one thing, Jewish people have always had a very different relationship to the Bible than modern evangelical Christians. They view each part of the Bible with far more nuance. The Bible for them, rightly, is not an instruction manual for how to avoid burning in fire for eternity after you die. Its parts are not equals, are in conversation with each other, and sometimes disagree. Specifically, they don’t go to psalms for ethical and legal authority. The psalmists and the prophets are sought after for their poetry, their advocacy for justice, and their worship liturgy—but not as legal authorities.

On the legal question of when life begins, the Jewish rabbis do their work through the Torah, specifically the laws of compensation in the Old Testament book of Exodus. According to the Old Testament book of Exodus, one who deliberately kills someone is guilty of murder, so it would seem then that if a fetus was considered a life, a person who for some culpable reason killed a fetus would also be guilty of murder. But the Torah doesn’t do this.

Instead, the rabbis do their interpretative work through a scenario described in this same section of Exodus in which two men are in a fight and one of them strikes a nearby pregnant woman and the blow causes her to miscarry. What the rabbis note about that passage is that the offender is guilty of a capital offense if the mother dies, but if her only harm is the loss of the fetus, the case is treated as one of property damage. Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, an ultra-Orthodox Jew wrote in his legal treatise, the Tzitz Eliezer, “It is clear that in Jewish law an Israelite is not liable to capital punishment for feticide. . . . An Israelite woman was permitted to undergo a therapeutic abortion, even though her life was not at stake. . . . This permissive ruling applies even when there is no direct threat to the life of the mother, but merely a need to save her from great pain, which falls within the rubric of ‘great need.’”

I find the Jewish commentary on abortion remarkable for two reasons. First, Jesus, from his birth to his ascension, was an observant rabbinic Jew, and so was every single person who wrote every single letter of your Bible. Second, this interpretation goes way back. Based on the writings we have in the Talmud (a collection of rabbinic interpretations of Torah that existed during Jesus’s time and even earlier) this was almost certainly the view of Jewish people when Jesus was alive.

These two points are remarkable to me because, if in fact Jesus disagreed with the Jewish authorities on the question on when life begins, the fact that the gospel writers included none of it would have been an incredible miss. Jesus was not afraid to disagree with the Pharisees and Sadducees on points of the law, and the gospel writers were not afraid to tell you about it.

*When I say that Jesus “probably” wasn’t pro-life**, I mean that Jesus almost certainly wasn’t pro-life. I simply cannot imagine that he believed life began at conception. It would defy everything I know.

**(as conservatives define the term)

Now, I want to be careful, lest this essay unleash a torrent of well-deserved backlash. First, while the Jewish authorities have never viewed fetuses as fully human and while they overwhelmingly support the public legalization of abortion, their views differ on what harm to the mother that must be substantiated before permitting an abortion. Virtually all hold that abortion is not just permitted but demanded when the mother’s life is at stake. They also virtually hold that abortion is never a capital offense. The rabbis differ on what harm is required to the mother for the act to be considered not sinful. For these reasons, I want to be very clear about my purposes behind this essay.

My purpose here is to cool the room down.

I want you to question what you have always thought absolutely certain.

I want to open you up to asking more questions.

I want to open you up to people whose opinions you never found worth hearing.

I want to kindle your interest in scientists and feminists and ancient Jewish rabbis and modern Jewish rabbis and the Jewish rabbi named Jesus.

I want to free you from being a single-issue voter.

I want you to understand that the modern movement against abortion is mostly a manufactured one.

Because right now I think most of you are just getting played with junk theology and junk science.

Despite the manufactured frenzy around “late-term” abortions, they are not legal and never have been. 92% of abortions take place in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. Of the 1.2% of abortions that take place at or after 21 weeks, almost all of them are performed to protect the life of the mother. And as for the fetus feeling pain? Neurons in the spinal cord do not form until week 23, which is about the point when the third trimester begins and abortions are no longer legal. The nerve fibers that connect to pain receptors in the cerebral cortex don’t form until, at earliest, 26 weeks. And the brain does not activate until about week 30.

Finally, while we are apt to demonize women who have an abortion for “financial reasons,” we usually miss the fact that most women who terminate a pregnancy live below the federal poverty line. We are talking in large part about women who have virtually no way to raise a child.

I don’t blame conservative evangelicals for their unwavering single-issue voting stance. I don’t blame them for their aversion to people who differ in this way. I too was a conservative evangelical and for most of my life their views were my views. If this describes you, I believe you are wrong, but I also believe you mean well. I am not angry at you.

But I am angry.

Because we are systematically manipulated to scapegoat our most vulnerable women and force them to carry a yolk they cannot bear—in the name of the Lord.

Because an elected group of overwhelmingly white men will on one day vote to restrict abortion access and on the next day vote to cut benefits to poor single mothers—in the name of the Lord.

Because on one day they will vote to protect life and on the next day all but ensure that life will consist of bitter misery—in the name of the Lord.

Because they will show up to the National Prayer Breakfast and bow in prayer and quote some Bible and salute the flag and proclaim some imaginary nonsense about the Founders and run ads in your district with promises to protect this country from terrorists and from all others who have no value for human life and we all know that means women who make the choice to terminate a pregnancy.

Because this little pious routine guarantees them success every election cycle.

And once elected they are free to do whatever they want and without consequence.

And cloaked in the protection of the Almighty (and their wealthy donors), they do.

They go to work every day and protect the extravagantly wealthy from anything that might possibly require contributing more to the poor mothers who must now endure even more pressure than the pressure they already did not know how to endure.

I am angry, but it is not with you that I am angry.

I am angry at the greedy and cowardly people in power who in the name of God protect themselves and their positions at the expense of poor single mothers and everyone else.

I have no doubt it will continue long after I’ve published this insignificant essay from this insignificant blog. I’m not the first or the smartest person to share these ideas. But now you know where I stand and why.

When God Moons Us

The command of the Torah that Jesus claimed is most important begins with an important preamble, which I will talk about today.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Deuteronomy c6

In this essay I will discuss the subversive and prophetic imagination found in the national story of the Jewish people—the liberation story of Moses. To that end, I will give special emphasis to the Hebrews’ most original and revolutionary gift to the world, monotheism. Modern people—being modern people—divorce this idea from its ancient context and in so doing miss most of its genius. Specifically, modern Christians use this verse to tell non-Christians they are going to burn in fire when they die because they don’t believe in the correct God, while modern secularists use this verse to characterize the Bible as arrogant and intolerant. Both of these ideas miss the mark. That a single God created all things is a progressive idea.

It is one of the most important ideas in the history of the world.

Before I begin, always remember the conventions and motivations of the Bible’s writers, which I belabor over and over on this blog. First, the history of Israel consists of successions of empires devastating and subjugating them, and, with few exceptions, everything in your Bible is a reaction to one of them. Second, and again with few exceptions, every Old Testament story is set during the empire previous to its writing, but is tailored to speak to life under the current empire. These stories were not inspired to tell the journalistic “history” of life under the previous empire, so much as to advance subversive arguments about the imperial systems of the writers’ day. These stories are a mixture of history and myth and take the form of see, this has happened to us before.

I say “myth,” but don’t take that to mean they are less than true.

It is out of that tradition that the Hebrew people offered the world the literary personification of their national hope—their prophet and liberator, Moses. Moses and the exodus story describe Hebrew life enslaved in the brick pits of Egypt in the heyday of its power. However, in the tradition I described above, the story and tradition of Moses was mostly born in the brick pits after the devastation wrought by the Assyrians and the Babylonians—the two earliest professional military superpowers of the ancient world.

In the exodus story, Moses grows up as a minister in the court of Pharaoh but later is forced to flee the country and live in the wilderness. Meanwhile, the Pharaoh decides to exploit the Hebrews as a source of cheap labor for his grand projects.

Let heavier work be laid upon the men that they may labor at it and pay no regard to lying words. So the taskmasters and the foremen of the people went out and said to the people, “Thus says Pharaoh.”

In the society described in the exodus story, society’s lowest people were useful only to the extent that they could meet production quotas. But constructing a society built on such gross oppression and quelling the inevitable unrest usually requires help—specifically help from the gods. To that end, the empires of the ancient world were awash in gods. As Walter Brueggemann writes, these gods were “immovable lords of order.” They were the backbone of the oppressive systems of the world’s empires. More than any other thing, their role was to control people’s imaginations. The functioning of those societies was evidence of the rightness of the religious systems because kings did prosper and bricks did get made.

The systems of imperial religion are never disinterested.

Today, we might identify the god of America as the stock market or the GDP and our brick workers in the dehumanized immigrants who work our fields, our hospitality sector, and our fast-food restaurants.

The subversive message in the exodus story was that the creator of all things wasn’t interested in supporting the imperial system, but those who lived in its shadow. God wasn’t a comfort to pharaoh and his taskmasters, but to the laborers in the brick pits.

And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage, and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning.

And in response to the cries of the Hebrews, God called Moses.

The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. . . . And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

Moses was the first prophet. When most evangelical readers hear the word “prophet,” the idea that generally comes to mind is something like fortune teller, but that is almost never what prophets did. The prophetic tradition is a tradition of offering up word pictures that originate from outside the power structures of the imperial gods. Walter Brueggemann describes prophecy as “words from elsewhere,” and I think that’s right. They were artists, poets, street performers, social critics, and irritants.

In these modes, the prophets worked to fan the flames of society’s collective imagination.

Prophetic criticism consists in nurturing society away from cry-hearers who are inept at listening and indifferent in response and to mobilizing society to its grief. For this reason, empires, which have no capacity or intention for listening to grief, are the constant target of prophetic concern. You find this in the Bible from start to finish.

Fear was and is the primary means by which empires stifle the imagination of those within its influence, and, to this end, the imperial gods were up to the task. First and foremost, the gods of the empire were local deities. They were not concerned with the well-being of anyone but their local worshipers, and they offered protection against whatever group was considered the “other.”

For example, the chief god of the Babylonian empire, who gave sanction to brutality towards the savage “other” was Marduk. In the Babylonian creation story, Marduk became the chief god after a clash with the god of chaos and ocean water, Tiamat. The clash began when Tiamat’s husband sought to kill all the other gods because they created too much noise (literally “babel”) and he couldn’t sleep. Out of Tiamat’s death came the creation of the earth (not coincidentally in the same order of creation as found in the Genesis creation story). It was the Babylonian’s task, according to this story, to subjugate the babel of the world to the domain of Babylon and its chief god, Marduk.

The creation story of Genesis was a prophetic critique of the Babylonian story. If nothing else, notice that when God finished creating all things, God rested. We draw all kinds of lessons out of God resting on the seventh day of the story, but the original message heard by the workers in the brick pits was clear and undeniable: God does not need empires to keep scary barbarians in check and, that being the case, there remains no more need for empires. Dominion over the creation should be exercised by humankind broadly, and our relationship to the creation should be more like that of a gardner rather than as a warrior.

This gets me to monotheism.

In the exodus story, when Moses took the Hebrews into the Sinai desert, he instructed them in the most foundation tenet in all of Judaism: The God of the slaves on the underside of the empire is the only God, is one, and cannot be captured with human images. What’s happening here? Is this just arrogance? Is this exclusivism? Is this hubris? Again, its easy for modern people who have become accustomed to these ideas to dismiss it this way. As if to say, how dare they think they have an exclusive claim to the divine? But that kind of criticism is mostly a reaction to a modern remaking of God into the image of Marduk. That kind of criticism loses seriousness in light of the fact that the idea of there being one God, one creator of all things, and one God to be worshipped was not an idea that came from the empire, so as to dominate all other people and ideas.

The idea of monotheism came out of the slave class.

And this should make perfect sense. A world in which all people and all things come from the same creator is a world in which all people are equal. This is a world in which the slaves are on the same plane as their taskmasters. A world like this created by an invisible God is a world in which no one can harness the power of God to exploit other people. A world in which all people and all things come from the same creator is incompatible with empire.

Do you see its genius now? The ethical precept that all people are created equal isn’t controversial anymore, but it was completely foreign to the ancient world. The dignity of all people was not the ethos of Babylon, Greece, or Rome. The idea that a senator from Rome and a slave from Carthage were equal was unthinkable. The fact that we at least give lip service to this idea is completely due to the courage and inspiration of the Hebrew slaves in Babylon.

Interestingly, as the story progresses, Moses and the Hebrews struggle with this revolutionary idea. Even the people who would benefit most from more egalitarian societies can be the most stubborn defenders of the status quo. This is the power of the imperial gods. In the exodus story, the newly freed Hebrews want to go back to an understanding of God as like the gods of Egypt because that’s all they have ever known. Their imaginations have been stifled for centuries. They want to go back to gods that have physical qualities. Gods that can be seen, felt, and understood. Gods with boundaries. Gods with limits.

In one part of the story, Moses is alone on Mount Sinai and he too is tempted in this way. Moses is on the mountain and asks that God show him his “glory.” When most modern listeners hear that word in the story, the connotation is something like brightness or shininess or grandeur. But the Hebrew word we translate “glory,” which is kavod, literally means “weight.” What’s happening here? Moses wants to know God’s dimensions, as if they go this far but not that far. As if they protect us but not them. Moses’s idea of God is one who would make the Hebrews into the next world superpower.

His question is akin to asking God, “just how big a boy are you?”

To this, God responds that Moses’s questions reveals a categorical misunderstanding. God cannot be seen. God cannot be measured. God isn’t like the gods of the empire. God isn’t a local deity who protects the welfare of one group to the exclusion of other. God is a universal creator who connects all things. Under this god, the welfare of one group was no longer disconnected to the welfare of everyone else. All are connected and all matter.

Then something funny happens. God tells Moses that he will cause himself and his goodness to pass by him, and once God had passed him by, Moses would see—as it is written in the Hebrew—God’s ahoray. Your Bible translates this word as God’s “back.”

What it literally means is “rear parts.”

(I know this is the Bible, but it’s okay to grin).

This is why I love the Bible. Not only were the Hebrew writers for centuries willing to push the limits of human imagination, but they had a sense of humor while doing it. The slaves in Babylon dared to imagine a literary tradition of liberation from the oppressive gods of Egypt, but when its main character wanted to retreat back to the imperial religion of Egypt, what did God do?

God mooned him.