Christianity & power:

...The relationship of Christianity to power is more complicated than one would think, looking at much of the current comment on the relations between church and state in places as different as Poland, the United States, El Salvador, and the Philippines...

...Or we accept them as a kind of unkept promise: someday we will know what it means to love our enemies, to serve rather than to be served, to forgive from the bottom of our hearts...

...We will have made some progress when our own situation appears as nightmarish to us, and our own vision as narrow and unnecessarily murderous as theirs was...

...We regard these words with reverence, as we should...

...Christianity is not unique in having accepted the patronage and protection of the rich and powerful...

...Christians have accepted, with varying degrees of ease, forms of authority which are, in practice, everything Jesus said his followers were not to be...

...A child would be selected and taken to the edge of a river and beaten until it began to weep...

...It is made possible by an openness to the work of God in us, an openness which trusts that God's working is a real thing, not a metaphor for the ethics of the believer but the source of that ethics, a source which the believer must always realize that he does not himself possess and cannot manipulate...

...The list is ugly and familiar: we have all heard of the Crusades and the Inquisition, the persecution of Jews, the genocidal crusade of Cromwell in Ireland, countless conversions at swordpoint, the forced conversion of Orthodox to Catholicism under the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the more recent forced conversion of Eastern-rite Catholics to Orthodoxy under Soviet sponsorship - no one, Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, mainstream churchman or Anabaptist, gets off untainted...

...But how limited is this point of view...

...The question of Christianity's relationship to power was clearly a problem from the beginning...

...What is not often considered in this context is the fact that Christianity is about the thorough transformation of the human being, a transformation which happens at the collective level as well as the individual level...

...In Luke's account of the temptation of Jesus, Satan tells Jesus that power over all of the kingdoms of the world has been given into his hands, and Jesus refused to pay Satan homage in order to receive power...

...The adults, moved by the child's suffering, wept too, and their weeping would turn to mourning as the child was drowned by someone sacred...

...And the problem is an ancient one: the first ecumenical council (if you except the council of Jerusalem) was convened not by a pope or by bishops, but by the authority of the emperor, whose influence was, if not decisive, nevertheless felt...

...The Aztecs might have felt that they were participants in a nightmare from which there was no awakening...

...We believe that the nightmarish quality of their ritual consists in believing it to have been necessary...

...Our horror may be greater where limited ritual death is concerned because, unlike the death of hundreds of thousands of people killed for strategic reasons, death on an altar suggests a demand by God for blood...

...There is nothing hypocritical about the claims many of us make to be Christian while at the same time we feel the need to accept violence as a tragic necessity...

...But our willingness to accept power and the allegiances which demand the use of force against other human beings has been the source of more misery in our time than anything else...

...The tears were all genuine, no doubt, and the ones which were not probably felt to those who forced themselves to shed tears the way our own false tears do: we know we should feel what we do not feel...

...he did not come to be served, but to serve, and to surrender his life as a ransom for many...

...A governmental demand for blood, on the other hand, does not...

...Christian allegiance to the state was heavily qualified, and killing, whether in war or for reasons of state, was discouraged where it was not grounds for excommunication...

...This transformation is brought about by God, not by any institution...

...And if the state finds it necessary to kill either the criminal within or the enemy without, isn't that command of the state and its acceptance by Christians a confession that Jesus's words are not adequate to all situations, that they are limited in application, smaller than the fullness of human being...

...One response to the words of Christ involves an interior change...

...Most commentators assume that the church is doing a good thing (if the church supports the sort of power the commentator likes), a bad thing (if it does not), or a forbidden thing (if the commentator is the sort who thinks that religion must never have any effect at all other than an emotional one, on those who happen to be attending a religious service...

...Faced with it we feel a certain helplessness, as if there were simply no alternative to choosing one violent side over another...

...we would resent it if someone were to scorn them...

...We are horrified by the thought of deliberate human sacrifice, the picture of the heart torn out and still bleeding in the hand of the Aztec priest...

...Can a society regard someone outside the borders of the state which claims to represent society as a brother or sister, someone I must die for if necessary, but never kill...

...It horrifies us in a way which Hiroshima does not...

...A divine demand for blood horrifies us...

...The theme of becoming great by becoming least recurs throughout the Gospels, and it is connected with compassion and forgiveness...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...But because the words of Christ challenge conventional views of authority the problem is particularly pointed in Christian history...

...But we do not take them straight, as instructions aimed at us...

...These statements of Jesus move us...

...When James and John show a desire for power in the kingdom they believe Jesus will establish, he tells them "You know that in the world, rulers lord it over their subjects, and their great men make them feel the weight of authority...

...This approach allows us to feel Christian, while assuring the inefficacy of Jesus's teaching at any level other than an emotional or esthetic one...

...they convince us that he was a special sort of person, uniquely compassionate...

...I read recently of an Aztec sacrifice, made to appeal to the rain God...

...this is a genuine difficulty for many people, we experience it as an agony which has no alternative...

...If, however, Jesus's words demand a change which will not allow us to kill the criminal or the enemy, the basis of much of our political life is shaken...

...At present we regard these counsels as incapable of fulfillment, as if Jesus were less than realistic...

...this was a necessary horror, a sacrifice involving real tears and real tragedy...

...If we believe that it is the might of the state which protects us, if we believe that we must rely on force, our claim to trust God is to at least a certain extent a sentimentality...

...but it shall not be so with you...

...Among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant, and whoever would be first must be the willing slave of all like the Son of Man...

...Can families, businesses, or governments be run on Christian principles...

...the need for financial security is another...

...Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me . . .Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you . . . You will not be forgiven unless you forgive your brother from the bottom of your heart...

...This is not our only form of idolatry...

...Although it would be an oversimplification to say that the early church was pacifist, it would be a much greater oversimplification to deny it...

...And no one is completely free of idolatry...

...even voluntary poverty and nonviolence can become idols, particularly when we believe that we possess them as virtues...

...Important doctrinal formulations involved not only Christian dogma but also national and regional allegiances, imperial and anti-imperial politics...

...I have a strong feeling that a sensitive Aztec observer felt keenly both the necessity of ritual murder, and the profound sadness which accompanies the knowledge that the world simply couldn't exist in any other way...

...We are told that we must not bear the napalmed child any malice, or enjoy the spectacle of the dying criminal, or delight in the killing of the enemy conscript...

...Many of the indictments that have been brought against the church have involved the manifestations of Christianity as a kind of power...

...For example, can a society regard a Charles Manson as one of the least of the brethren...