The Fall of the Church

By Roger Haydon Mitchell

This book prepares the way for the practice of kenarchy: a humanity-loving, world-embracing, inclusive approach to life and politics. It does so by identifying two conflicting streams in Christianity: the love stream that the stories of Jesus portray and many of us desire to follow, and the sovereignty system that much of theology, church, and mission represents. Explaining how the two streams arose in early Western history, The Fall of the Church demonstrates that far from being complementary expressions of Christianity, the sovereignty stream embodies the very system that the Jesus of the gospels opposed. The fall of the church is described in terms of its embrace of the sovereignty system and the subsequent history of the West is explained as the story of the resulting partnership. If transcendence is truly like Jesus, then, rather than abandoning the empire system, God has remained within the church and empire in order to empty it out from the inside. Mitchell argues that this divine strategy has continued throughout the history of the West and is coming to a head, right now, in our contemporary Western world, and that the time is ripe for an incarnational politics of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jul 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781621897699

Roger Haydon Mitchell

Roger Haydon Mitchell directs a charitable trust that advises the church on negotiating social change. For the last six years he has been a postgraduate researcher in Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster. He is a member of the Society for the Study of Theology.

Book preview

1

A Contemporary Conundrum

(A) Introduction: setting out the conundrum

This first chapter sets about unpacking the background to a contemporary conundrum that perplexes many people in our pluralistic society. I refer to the realization that while Christians perceive themselves to have been on the back foot, pushed increasingly toward the margins of the public forum for the last one and a half centuries, the typical secular humanist feels the same way. They feel that it is the Christians who have dominated and they who have been disadvantaged. From the perspective of this book, this is a paradox with unfortunate implications for both groups of people. It makes the Christians defensive, feeling that somehow they are wrongly discriminated against and in danger of losing their ancient rights. That they need to gather the faithful to prayer, to turn back the clock, to start up specifically Christian legal initiatives, schools, parties, and lobby groups and generally become increasingly strident in their demands to be heard. The secularists, on the other hand, feel as a result that the Christians are still so very much alive and dominant that they need to make their own position more distinct and to defend in turn those hard-won cultural freedoms and changes in the law that represent their seemingly secular approach to life. The problem is that neither position expresses either the actual strengths or the real weaknesses of the two perspectives and their potential contributions to contemporary society. Both of them, I suggest, are manifesting different aspects of something seriously wrong with the way our society has developed over history and that is coming to a head at this critical time in the Western world.

In order to get our heads around this conundrum and the problem that lies behind it, this chapter traces and explains four stages in the past history of the West. These are: the initial context of Christian faith and political power, the subsumption of transcendence by sovereignty, the circumstances and effects of the fall of the church, and the subsequent era of modernity, postmodernity, and the rejection of transcendence. The sections will work hard to clarify unfamiliar words and subjects, so it will be well worth persevering even if the language appears daunting at first!

(B) Four stages in the development of the contemporary puzzle

(1) Christian faith and political power

To understand this conundrum properly, we need to go back a long way, to the very beginning of the relationship between Christian faith and political power. This takes us to the dawn of the Christian era, to around 15 CE, or what used to be called AD 15. This change in the way we record the past centuries is a good place to start, even before we look at what was happening at the time. For it marks a recent shift in understanding Christian history from an assumed common faith where past years are described as the year of our Lord (AD: from the Latin anno domini), to a multi-faith and no-faith situation where we recognize a past Common Era (CE) from which the contemporary Western world takes its bearings. This change would be put down by many to secularization, or the move from a Christian worldview to one where the Christian faith is mainly only a memory, and the majority perspective is without conscious recourse to Christian religious practice or belief. In this way secularization presents an example of the very puzzle under investigation here, where the Christian feels marginalized but the secular world still feels the lingering impact of what Nietzsche called the shadow¹ of the Christian past.

From the standpoint of this book, the old way of describing past years as years of our Lord exposes the heart of the misunderstanding that determined the fall of the church and is the root cause of our conundrum. The muddle revolves around the question of what lordship really means. The year 15 CE locates the point where the answer to this question came into a sharp focus that set the direction for the political system of the Western world to the present day. For it was then that the hierarchical power of empire invaded divinity, that what became known as the cult of Caesar was initiated by Tiberias Caesar when he elevated his father to the status of god at his death. Lordship and transcendence were united as one. This deification of political leadership was not entirely new. It had already emerged in the east of the empire where the practice had been engaged in by past Egyptian empires, and briefly by the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great. But now it took place at the power center of the most extensive empire that the world had ever seen.

By this time the Roman Empire had existed for over two hundred years and the city of Rome itself for more than seven hundred. While the city and its empire had started out as a republic ruled by a senate of aristocrats, it had been moving towards a totalitarian monarchy for several generations. The development had been gathering momentum under the leadership of Julius Caesar, and came to a head with the emergence of Octavius Caesar as supreme monarch from 31 BCE onwards. By the time of his death in 15 CE, the monarchy was ready for the crowning event of his deification. As by this time the whole known world was under Roman rule through a system of puppet rulers made up of local propertied aristocracy, the emperor Tiberias Caesar was now affirmed as Son of God in his leadership over them all. This was declared to be the case publicly on numerous buildings and substantiated by the presence of the Roman garrisons that secured the pax Romana. It was underlined by the taxes regularly collected to pay for it. It is now generally agreed that by the time of Jesus Roman imperial rule was integrated in this way in Israel too, as in other similarly occupied lands, and that the high-priestly family of Annas and Caiaphas who feature in the gospel accounts were Rome’s local elite in the south of Israel alongside King Herod in the north.²

Given all this, it is striking to realize that in approximately the same year that Tiberias Caesar became Son of God, 15 CE, Jesus was coming of age and questioning the Jewish authorities, according to Luke’s narrative.³ By the time Jesus began his public life, Tiberias Caesar was well established as divine lord with this title commonly displayed in public places.⁴ It was into this political arena that Jesus stepped, entering the synagogues and streets with a very different declaration of the government of God, and with himself as the example of a divine lordship in complete contrast to the lordship of Caesar. The gospels’ own introduction of Jesus as Son of God,⁵ the stories of Satan and the demons’ recognition of him as such,⁶ and the public questions and taunts about whether he was the Son of God or not,⁷ were all in the context of the use of the title to identify the lordship of Caesar. Once this political context is properly understood, then Jesus’ frequent emphasis on the true nature of lordship assumes unavoidable significance. Warnings such as Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven,⁸ take on a whole new political dimension. Debates over who’s the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?⁹ must similarly be understood to question the legitimacy of the Roman order. Jesus’ statement Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven¹⁰ can be seen to challenge head-on the current assumptions about the nature of both lordship and deity. The radical implications of his intention are even clearer in the discussions at the last supper, when he said, You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great men exercise authority over them. But it is not this way among you . . .¹¹ There simply were no other possible existing referents for the lords of the Gentiles than the lords of the Romans.

Finally, when John’s gospel tells the story of Jesus’ vivid depiction of the fullness of transcendence in the incident where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, including Judas’s, the counterpolitical nature of lordship in the government of God is clear. It appears that this is what Jesus came to reveal at the critical moment in world history. As he puts it, You call Me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I gave you an example that you also should do as I did to you.¹² This helps give clarity to the nature of the apostle Paul’s understanding of the fullness of time.¹³ It is the meeting point of times, the moment where the trajectories of God’s governance and fallen lordship meet.

From this perspective we can conclude, as contemporary historical and archeological research makes clear, that Jesus’ message and demeanor were subversively political from the start. The whole direction of his teaching and practice positions the testimony of Jesus in confrontation with empire and makes the gospel the good news that God’s politics is not a dominating transcendence colonized by sovereignty but rather the gift of self-emptying love or kenosis.¹⁴ This word kenosis is derived from the Greek word keno used by the apostle Paul in Philippians chapter 2, and refers to the emptying out of hierarchical power by Jesus, demonstrated throughout the gospel narratives, expressed by the motif of taking up the cross, culminating in Jesus’ crucifixion and vindicated by his resurrection. This reversal of imperial sovereignty manifest in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life forms the heart of the kingdom or governance of God. In order to distinguish clearly between sovereignty and the totally