Rocky Cape Christian Community

Jesus’ Primacy Over the Powers

excerpts from the book by Vernard Eller

1. Christian Anarchy—The Very Idea!

Yes, it wasn’t easy to get the word radical understood as a fitting adjective for discipleship. And yes, it was even harder to get revolution and revolutionary so understood. But dare we now go on to anarchy? Do you see me going from bad to worse? Not so. I stand prepared to show that to go from revolution to anarchy is to go from wrong to right, from misunderstanding to understanding, from unbiblical to biblical, from world to gospel. And yes, it will take another transforming renewal of our minds to understand anarchy as the gospel, the good news it actually is.

The word is ANARCHY. The prefix (“an-”) is the equivalent of the English “un-,” meaning “not”; it does not particularly mean “anti-” or against. Thus, we are speaking of that which is more not something than it is opposed to or against something. The “-archy” root (which I have made into an English term spelled a-r-k-y) is a common Greek word that means “priority,” “primacy,” “primordial,” “principal,” “prince,” and the like. The most frequent appearance of “arky” in the New Testament is translated as “beginning.” Indeed, in Colossians 1:18 Paul actually identifies Jesus as “the beginning,” “the prime,” “THE ARKY.” However, our particular concern with the word is in Paul’s writings where it is translated “principalities.” Clearly, the apostle assumes that we live in a world with arkys filled that threaten to undo us—and those constantly battling each other for primacy.

For us, then, “arky” identifies any principle of governance claiming to be of primal value for society. “Government” (that which is determined to govern human action and events) is a good synonym—as long as we are clear, that political arkys are far from being the only “governments” around. Not at all; churches, schools, philosophies, social standards, peer pressures, fads and fashions, advertising, planning techniques, psychological and sociological theories—all are arkys out to govern us.

“Anarchy” (“unarkyness”), it follows, is simply the state of being unimpressed with, disinterested in, skeptical of; nonchalant toward, and uninfluenced by the high claims of any and all arkys. And “Christian Anarchy”—the special topic of this book—is a Christianly motivated “unarkyness.” Precisely because Jesus is THE ARKY, the Prime of Creation, the Principal of All Good, the Prince of Peace and Everything Else, Christians dare never grant a human arky the primacy it claims for itself. Precisely because God is the Lord of History we dare never grant that it is in the outcome of the human arky contest that the determination of history lies.

Obviously, the idea of “power” goes hand in hand with “arky”; the two are inseparable. Indeed, every time Paul uses “arky” in the sense of “principalities,” he couples it with one of the Greek “power” words. Yet regarding both “power” and “arky” we must make a crucial specification: we are always supposing a power or a government that is imposed upon its constituency. It is, of course, proper to speak of, say, “the power of love.” Yet this is power in an entirely different sense of the word in that it carries no hint of imposition at all. Looking only at the phrase itself; “the kingdom of God” would appear to be an “arky” no different from the others. Yet we will come to see that this is not so. When Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world,” he was saying that, although all worldly arkys have to be imposed onto people, his is radically different in that it does not have to be—and in fact is not.

This matter of an arky’s being imposed leads us to the helpful term “heteronomy”—namely, that law or rule which is “different from,” “other than,” or “extraneous to” whomever it would govern. All worldly arkys are by nature heteronomous—each is out to impose its idea of what is right upon whoever has any different idea.

Consequently, for secular anarchists the solution is “autonomy”—the self being a law unto itself (which is what we customarily have understood “anarchy” to be). However, Christianity contends that autonomy is simply another form of heteronomy, that to use my own self-image as the arky governing myself is actually to impose a heteronomous arky upon me. The assumption that I am the one who best knows myself and knows what is best for myself is to forget that I am a creature (a sinful creature, even) and that there is a Creator who, being my Creator (and also being somewhat smarter than I am), knows me much better than I ever can know myself.

For Christian anarchists, then, the goal of anarchy is “theonomy”—that is, the rule or the arky of God. At this idea, of course, the world rises up to insist that the arky of God is just as impositional as (if not more so than) any other arky that might be named. But Christians say No—and that on two counts. First, particularly as God has been revealed in Jesus Christ, the style of his arky is not that of imposition but of the opposite, namely, that of the cross, the self-givingness of agape-love. And second, God’s arky, his will for us, is never totally foreign to us but corresponds most exactly to our true instinct and destiny. Anarchist Søren Kierkegaard hammered this one home with his analysis of the Danish word for “duty”—which, in our context, would represent God’s arky for us. Kierkegaard writes: “For our duty is not imposed upon us but it lies on us from birth.” Rather than a heteronomous imposition, God’s arky spells the discovery of that which is truest to myself and my world.

The contention of Christian Anarchy, then, is that worldly arkys are part of the “all” that dies in Adam and no longer part of the “all” that in Christ is made alive (1 Cor. 15:22). Consequently, worldly arkys must die (and we must die to them) in order for the Arky of God (his kingdom) to be made alive in us (and us in it).

At this point of definition, then, we should note that the idea of “revolution” is not anarchical in any sense of the word. Revolutionists are very strongly opposed to certain arkys that they know to be “bad” and to be the work of “bad people.” However, they are just as strongly in favour of what they know to be “good” arkys that are the work of themselves and other good people like them. For instance, these revolutionists might seem to be super-anarchical, finding nothing good to say about the establishment U.S. arky; but they turn out to be very pro-archical, finding nothing but good to say about a revolutionary communist arky. Indeed, the regular procedure of “revolution” is to form a (good) power-arky that can either overthrow and displace or else radically transform the (bad) arky currently in power. This selectivity amounts to a passionate faith in the power of arkys for human good and the farthest thing possible from a truly anarchical suspicion and mistrust of every human arky.

This book was written in a way no other of mine has been written. Some books I have been asked to do, some I have thought up on my own, some I have seen coming, some I have stumbled into—but into this one I was I was enticed by a serpent too innocent to know what he was doing. My old friend Bernard Ramm, evangelical beyond fundamentalism and professor at American Baptist Seminary of the West, simply wrote me a brief note:

I would appreciate a letter from you on “passive anarchism.” The bulk of the material on the subject is devoted to the various Russian or revolutionary views. But I suspect that there is a “passive Christian anarchism” (“all states are created equally wicked”). One review just mentioned Blumhardt—and if my memory serves me okay, you have a book on the father/son.

Now that poor man certainly wrote to me without the intention of starting anything. Nevertheless, I gave him just what he was asking for—beginning with a long letter; which I intended to use also as an article, but which wound up as the very chapter you are now reading.

However, my first reaction to Ramm’s note was, “what on earth is he talking about? I don’t know anything about ‘anarchism period’—let alone ‘passive Christian anarchism.’ And I haven’t the foggiest notion as to what all that has to do with the Blumhardts. All I could think was, “Bernie’s got him the wrong boy.”

Yet, if I were to have any chance of keeping Bernie bluffed regarding my scholarly reputation, I would have to come up with something. And the something I did come up with was the recollection that Jacques Ellul (the Frenchman who supported the socialist revolution in Spain, only to become disenchanted with it and turn to Jesus) wrote an article on the topic some years back. I must have been feeling tired or ornery when I originally looked it over, because I dismissed it entirely as one of his less successful efforts. All I could remember is that he had set out to demonstrate the agreement between his personal version of Christianity (which he called “anarchism”) and the secular anarchism of what Ramm calls “the various Russian or revolutionary views.” It had been my impression that, in the process, Ellul had so qualified his Christian anarchism as to lose the real concept of “anarchy” entirely.

Yet, for Ramm’s sake, I had to dig up that old article, “Anarchism and Christianity,” and in the process, of course, I reread it—no, truly read it for the first time: “Oh, that’s what you meant by ‘Christian anarchism.’ Right on, Friar Jacques! And sure, if that’s what anarchism is, then that’s exactly where the Blumhardts belong, too.”

So now, as “the oracle of the man whose eye is opened (finally),” I propose here to enlarge Ellul’s insight into a thesis regarding Christian history itself. To my mind, Ellul demonstrates decisively that a particular version of “anarchism” (Ramm’s adjective “passive” is not quite the right modifier) is the socio-political stance of the entire Bible in general and the New Testament in particular. I would add that, from there, the understanding was picked up by that church tradition perhaps most often identified with “radical discipleship”—through which it came even to Ellul himself

In very broad strokes, I would trace that somewhat amorphous tradition (a tradition without a body) like this: Although there are scattered flashes of it within earlier church history, the thread first establishes itself in the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century. There it is found in the Anabaptists, predecessors of the Mennonites and other groups. My own Church of the Brethren was born out of this tradition in the eighteenth century. And there are other denominations that show more or less of the influence since. Not necessarily the term “anarchism” but the spirit and idea could be cited out of the early life of all these bodies.

As we move from institutional groupings to individual thinkers, the anarchism is even easier to spot. The title of the published doctoral dissertation version of my doctoral dissertation was “Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship” (perhaps the first time the phrase “radical discipleship” appeared in print). And it doesn’t require much effort to show that, in attitude, S.K. was quite anarchistic toward church, state, and society.

I didn’t know where Ramm had found the word anarchy in connection with the Blumhardts; but the identification is accurate. The one explicit use of the word I find is in the younger Blumhardt’s statement:

Of course, thought cannot go too far in this direction before we come upon a word which is very much forbidden today. Yet there is something to be said for it. I will state it right out: “Anarchy” Regarding the inhabitants of earth, a certain freedom, a veritable rulelessness, would almost be better than this nailed-up-tight business which as much as turns individual peoples into herds of animals closed to every great thought. (Thy Kingdom Come [Eerdmans, 1980], p. 21)

And the idea, if not the word, comes through in the following remarks—which could be multiplied at length:

All [the arkydom] we have had up to this point is on its last run downwards. Our theology is moving down with the rapidity of a lowering storm. Our ecclesiastical perceptions are rapidly becoming political perceptions. Our worship services are being accommodated to the world. And thus it is necessary that all that has been should cease, should come to its end, making room again for something new, namely, the kingdom of God.

Again:

People are afraid of the collapse of the world. I am looking forward to it. I wish it would begin right now to crash and break apart. For this world of the humanly great is and remains the cause of all misery. They cannot do anything about it, these well-intentioned people, these good things and ministers, these excellent prelates and popes. However much they try, they cannot. I would like to tell all of them, “You cannot do it!”

Subsequent to the Blumhardts Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have shown more-or-less anarchistic tendencies. Then Jacques Ellul crystallized the idea and gave it shape and form to where we can talk about it.

The concept of Christian Anarchy is so very crucial today because it enables us to see that what commonly passes as radical-discipleship has slipped a cog and moved clear outside the biblical and historical tradition. As Ellul says:

The anarchist position is the only one in which I often feel ease. I am myself there. On the other hand, I am not at ease either with those of the right-wing (traditional capitalists and guardians of Western Culture) which doesn’t interest me, or in any left-wing position, for I am not a political socialist or even less a communist. And I am not at all, really, not at all, at ease with the Christian left....

When asked whether he did not want to see the establishment of a new social order, Ellul replied:

Oh, no, not at all! On the contrary, I believe that the greatest good that could happen to society today is an increasing disorder.... I am in no way pleading in favor of a different social order. I am pleading for the regression of all the powers of order.

Ellul’s “anarchism” has him most markedly distinguished from and opposed to those intent on creating “a new, Christian social order.” That is the group he identifies as “the Christian Left.” And what we have here called “the contemporary version of radical discipleship” clearly constitutes at least one segment of that Christian Left. The problem (as shall become clear) is that these people are totally dedicated to “revolution” where Ellul sees Christianity dedicated to “anarchy.” The two ideas are not simply different but actually opposed to each other. And it is to this point we will return time and again throughout the treatment that follows.

Ellul grounds his concept of Christian Anarchy with a quick survey of the Bible, focusing upon its opinion of that particular (and perhaps prototypical) arky, the civil government, or state. I shall do an even quicker survey of his survey, centering upon those places where I want to say something of my own.

As key and theme statement, Ellul naturally uses God’s and Samuel’s warnings about what will be the harvest of Israel’s bright dreams for a “mono-arky.” Right out of the gate, then, King Saul demonstrates the truth of what God and Samuel had said. Ellul next calls David’s reign “an exception” and proceeds to recount the sad history of the remainder of the monarchy. But I want to insist that David is not the exception but actually the heart of the pattern.

Until the time of David’s adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband, it is indeed the case that he was brilliantly successful in forming a strong arky that accomplished all sorts good for Israel. Yet upon the discovery of that sin, God tells the king, “I anointed you king over Israel [and did all these fine things through you].... And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. Why have you despised the word of the word of the Lord, to do evil in his sight?” (2 Sam. 12:7-9).

None of David’s accomplishments actually should be credited to the power of his arky. They were manifestations of God’s arky working through him. David’s sin, then, was precisely the claiming of that arky power as his own, proposing that his kingly arky gave privilege even over God’s moral arky that prohibits murder. And if, even with so good and dedicated a believer as David, power-arky inevitably goes pretentious, then what hope is there that other human arkys can ever do better? Hear the word of Blumhardt to these well-intentioned people, these good kings and ministers, these excellent prelates and popes (these zealous Christian revolutionaries): “You cannot do it!”

Far from being the exception, David is our one best argument. With his arkycal pretension (even though repented), his career goes into the skid that runs right on through the breakup of the kingdum under Solomon and into the disaster of the kings that followed. Indeed, in the process of recounting the dreadfulness of the arky of one king, Jehoram, the writer says, “Yet the Lord would not destroy Judah, for the sake of David his servant, since he promised to give a lamp to him and to his sons forever” (2 Kings 8:19). God’s covenantal promise was the only thing keeping the Davidic arky afloat. And of course, even that sad ship sank once for all, with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile.

Does this mean, then, that God’s covenant with David came to nothing? Not at all. By this time, prophets had come to see that the track of God’s promise was never meant to be that of the human arky of David. That was a false lead. No, the actual track of the covenant was that pointing to the coming Messiah, the one true Son of David. And that Jesus, of course, turned out to be King of the one truly anarchist, nonimpositional, nonheteronomous, not-of-this worldly-kingdom. Ellul is right that the Bible’s mainline tradition regarding politics is most “unarkycal,” can be deemed as nothing but “anarchist.”

In the New Testament Jesus is presented as history’s Arch-Anarchist. He told his disciples about his victory over temptation in the wilderness (Satan asking him to turn stones into bread, to leap from the pinnacle of the temple, and to worship him so he could be king over all nations) to inform them that he did not come as a political messiah.

Yet, “political messiah” is precisely what a good many Christians would now make of Jesus—namely, sponsor of the particular revolutionary arky they have in mind for bringing peace and justice to the world. As much as any word in Scripture, Jesus’ condemning of arky-messiahship as a temptation places him distinctly in “anarchy” over against any and all who, instead, hold that are indeed good human arkys elected and sponsored by God.

Another picture of Jesus’ anarchism is his appearance before Pilate, particularly as it is recounted in John 18:33-19:11. Let me try a paraphrase that—admittedly far from Jesus in its language—may nevertheless catch the “feel” of the incident:

Please don’t bother yourself to tell me how great is this Roman Empire of yours and how great the fact that you are a governor of it. I’ve heard that stuff all my life and know already. Yet I also happen to know that the one, real, kingdom isn’t even of this world. I know, too, that you couldn’t as much as lift a finger if my Father didn’t let you it. Sure, you can crucify me—if he lets you. But there is no way you can eliminate me. So just let it be, Pilate. I don’t want to talk to you, because nothing you say makes one bit of difference anyhow. Let’s get on with this crucifixion; and I’ll see you day after tomorrow, at the resurrection, OK?

Would it not be fair to characterize that attitude as “anarchistic”? Jesus will grant not one bit of weight to Pilate and his Empire.

Another such picture is that of Jesus and the tribute money (Mark 12:13-17). There Jesus’ questioners face him with the political choice they consider all-decisive: “Are you going to be a rightist who supports the civil establishment with your taxes; or are you going to be a leftist revolutionary who opposes that evil establishment by withholding them?” To which Jesus comes back as perfect anarchist: “I’m not going to be either one. That’s a fake choice. Whether a person chooses God or not is the only real issue—and one’s political preference has nothing to do with it. Give God what belongs to God.”

As Ellul puts it:

“Render unto Caesar...” in no way divides the exercise of authority into two realms.... [Those words] were said in response to another matter: the payment of taxes, and the coin. The mark on the coin is that of Caesar; it is the mark of his property. Therefore give Caesar this money; it is his. It is not a question of legitimizing taxes! It means that Caesar, having created money, is its master. That’s all. Let us not forget that money, for Jesus, is the domain of Mammon, a satanic domain. (Anarchism, p. 20)

When he comes to Romans 13, however; Ellul really shines. The passage, of course, is the first a person normally would go to in order to rebut our “anarchism” argument. But Ellul won’t let such people have it; he wants it as a key to his argument. His contention is that there is nothing here lending one bit of legitimacy to human arky, Roman or otherwise. Rather, what Paul actually is about is deliberately citing and following Jesus, in the effort to protect “anarchy” from being confused with, and misread as, “revolution.”

Thus, “there is no authority except from God,” etc. (v. 1) says nothing different from what we just heard Jesus say in John 19:11. If I may help him a bit, Paul is saying: “Be clear, any of those human arkys are where they are only because God is allowing them to be there. They exist only at his sufferance. And if God is willing to put up with a stinker like the Roman Empire, you ought to be willing to put up with it, too. There is no indication God has called you to clear it out of the way or get it converted for him. You can’t fight an Empire without becoming like the Roman Empire; so you had better leave such matters in God’s hands where they belong.”

Then, in verses 6-7, Paul in effect joins Jesus in warning against the withholding of taxes. Such action smacks of fighting the empire. The proper name for it is “tax revolt”—and that signifies the pitting of a “good” revolutionary arky against the “bad” establishment one. Otherwise, letting Caesar take his coin—as Jesus would have it—is the “anarchy” of going so completely with God’s arky that any and all human arkys (along with their tax coins) become as nothing. Just the opposite, withholding the coin is the “revolution” that stakes everything upon the contest of human arkys—supposedly to insure the victory of the good, Christian arky that will spell the salvation of the race.

Finally, Ellul picks up on the fact that Paul explicitly does not name military service as something owed to the government. He takes this to indicate that Paul, again, understood himself to be following Jesus in seeing that the logic of tax payment does not apply regarding military service. A human being is anything but the “nothing” a few tax coins are. And the human being bears the image of God, not of the emperor. A true anarchist will never grant that any worldly arky (including the church) owns people.

With this, we come to some basic principles of Christian:

For Christians, “anarchy” is never an end and goal in itself. The dying-off of arky (or our dying to arky) is of value only as a making of room for the Arky of God.

Christian anarchists have no opinion as to whether secular society would be better off with anarchy than it is with all its present hierarchies. We can say only as much as Blumhardt said: “There is no way anarchy could be much worse than what we have now.”

Christian anarchists do not even argue that anarchy is a viable option for secular society. Ellul: “Political authority and organization are necessities of social life but nothing more than necessities. They are constantly tempted to take the place of God” (Anarchism, p.22).

The threat of the arkys is not so much their existence as it is our granting that existence reality and weight—our giving ourselves to them, attaching importance to them, putting faith in them, making idols of them. Revolutionists fall into this trap in their intention of using good arkys to oppose and displace the bad ones—thus granting much more power and being to the arkys (both evil power to the bad ones and righteous power to the good ones) than is the truth of the matter.

Christian anarchists do not hold that arkys, by nature, are “of the devil.” Such absolutist, damning talk is rather the mark of revolutionists concerned to make an enemy arky look as bad as possible in the process of making their own arky look good. No, for Christian anarchists the problem with arkys is, rather, that they are “of the human”—i.e., they are creaturely, weak, ineffectual, not very smart, while at the same time they are extravagantly pretentious. They pose as so much more important (or fearsome) than they actually are. There is no intent to deny that this “human fleshliness” does indeed give the devil many opportunities—but that is as much true of good arkys as is it of the bad ones. The only thing more devilish than a “bad” arky is a “holy” one.

Christian anarchists would not buy Ramm’s clever characterization that “all states are created equally wicked.” They would agree that all are equally human and none the least bit divine. But my Brethren ancestors, for instance, were well aware that when they fled the persecuting arkys of Germany for the (comparatively) free arky of William Penn, they were trading a bad arky for a better one. And they were appropriately grateful to God for the change. But that from which their anarchy did preserve them was the confusing of Penn’s arky with the kingdom of God. An arky is an “arky” for all that. None is as good as it thinks it is or gives itself out to be, and there is no guarantee that even a good one will stay good. The place where the Brethren settled within Penn’s arky (Germantown) is now a Philadelphia slum.

So, good arky or not, those anarchists retained a healthy biblical suspicion of arkys in general. There is no denying that, as he chooses, God can and does make positive use of the arkys—bad ones as well as good ones. But it does not follow that we dare ever accept any as being select instruments of his goodness and grace.

And it was none other than anarchist Ellul who once chided the Christian revolutionists for their inability to see any moral distinction between the arky of the U.S. government and those of Hitler and Stalin. Christian Anarchy does allow room for the relative moral distinctions between arky and arky—and real appreciation for the same.

It is no part of Christian Anarchy to want to attack, subvert, unseat, or try to bring down any of the world’s arkys. (It is here that Ramm’s “passive” makes sense, although it will not do so regarding points to follow.) To fight arkys, we have seen, is to form counter-arkys. It is to enter the contest of power (precisely that which Christian Anarchy rejects in principle). It is to introduce arky in the very attempt to eliminate it. To undertake a fight against evil on its own terms (to pit power against power) is the first step in becoming like the evil one opposes.

Speaking of anarchy’s model, Ellul says: “Jesus does not represent a-politicism (having no opinion whatsoever on political matters) or spiritualism. His teaching is a fundamental attack on political authority.... He challenges every attempt to justify the political realm and rejects its authority because it does not conform to the will of God” (Anarchism, p.20). With this and what follows, Christian Anarchy can no longer be called “passive.”

Ellul also wrote: “As a Christian one must participate in the world of action. But one must do so to reject it, to confront it with refusal that alone can call into question, or even prevent, the unchecked growth of power” (Anarchism, p. 22).

Today’s arkys and those that promote them commonly assume that by bringing our power to bear and working a change at “the top,” we can trigger a revolution of the entire system. Ellul thought differently:

I have arrived at this maxim: “Think globally, act locally.” This represents the exact opposite of the present way of doing things. We naturally try to bring about change by demanding centralized action—by getting the state or the highest authorities we know to send decrees down from above. But this can not have any success. The human facts are too complex and the bureaucracy of such a procedure only becomes heavier and heavier. . . .

Christian Anarchy doesn’t always have to be trying for “results.” It can afford to be realistic and thus also more honest. And because it can be honest (speaking the truth in love), Christian Anarchy can also be less manipulatively authoritarian. It isn’t trying to make anybody do anything. It is simply taking the liberty to be free.

The nonconformity of Christian Anarchy—the refusal to recognize or accept the authority of the arkys of this world—is genuine human freedom. And this is not at all the same thing as “autonomy” (the privilege to rule one’s self). No human arky can create or grant freedom; the idea of “government,” of “imposed arky,” is essentially contradictory to that of “freedom.”

What really gets in among the ribs of an arky is when anyone, upon being spoken to, fails to snap to attention, salute, and say, yes, sir” (like Jesus refused to scrape and bow, or even enter into a dialogue, before Pilate). Arkys don’t really care whether you love them or fear them. What they can’t stand is being ignored, or bypassed completely, like God bypassed the Jewish and the Roman arkys through the resurrection of Jesus. That gives big-shots as much trouble as being ignored—or anything else threatening their sense of self-importance. True, as with Jesus, showing disrespect toward an arky is the best way of getting yourself crucified. But anarchists are used to that.

Even in all this, in the freedom of ignoring the arkys of this world, we are not just out to create freedom for ourselves. No, it is, rather, as the Blumhardts put it, that we have made a space for something new: the Arky of God—the God whose service is perfect freedom through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Regarding the tradition of my own Church of the Brethren, it easy to see that ours was indeed a truly biblical anarchism up to the halfway point of this century—when we converted to the social activism that led us into leftist agitation in Central America and elsewhere. My guess is that it was the Social Gospel movement that tipped us into the faith that the world could be saved (or at least vastly improved) through our inspired arky actions of revolution and reform. Now our ancient anarchism has become an object of scorn: “Look at how much more actual good we have accomplished using arky power rather than shying from it!” ... I wonder.

It certainly proved right for Jesus not to let himself be associated with the just and righteous revolution of the tax-withholding Zealots. Rome saw to it that that “godly effort” came to nothing. Yet, of course, that revolution was violent. So let me now tell the story of the most successful Christian nonviolent revolution in history—involving that same Roman establishment, would you believe?

You see, once upon a time there was this little anarchist church—in fact, the very one we’ve been talking about—that of Jesus, Paul, and the other New Testament Christians. And it—in its rather weak, unorganized, anarchical way (following the pattern of its anarchical apostle)—went bumbling about the empire, evangelizing handfuls of individuals here and there and leaving them in little anarchical house-groups.

Actually, in comparison to some other churches of other eras, its church-growth statistics weren’t all that bad. Nevertheless, in time, some strategic planners came along who said, “Folks, this anarchical way of going at things is stupid. We’ll never get the world won for Christ this way. Why, people are being born faster than we’re set up to convert them (infant baptism not yet having been invented); we’ll never catch up. We’ve got to start thinking big and quit being so leery about using a bit of organization and power. We need to operate from strength. What we really ought to do is go for the Arky—go for the Big One. God wants his church to grow. And just think of how much more good we can accomplish by using arky power rather than shying from it!”

And wouldn’t you know, it worked! They went for the emperor and got him—and he brought the whole of the Big Arky over with him. Christianity was proclaimed the official religion of the Roman Empire—and the world was won for Christ. You know, you have to smile a bit at the Old Anarchy, thinking that three thousand in one day was pretty big stuff. I don’t know just how long it took to get the changeover recorded; but I do know the Vatican computers were jammed trying to move names across from the PAGAN column to the CHRISTIAN column—until somebody realized it was a lot easier to just switch the headings.

At one fell swoop we now had a whole empireful of Christians—all of them finally in a position to do some real good for humanity and bring in a truly just society. Talk about revolution! The church praised God from whom all blessings flow ... and the emperor snickered all the way to the bank. His empire had found the Lord and become “Christian” without having to make any changes at all. Christianity had done all the changing, and we now had “The HOLY Roman Empire.” Pretty neat, wouldn’t you say?

But just look at what actually happened in this Christian revolutionizing of the empire. The church became the Biggest Arky of All, graciously taking unto itself every evil the empire had ever represented. It sacrificed all understanding and appreciation of its God-given anarchy in its zeal to make the world good and do good for it. It lost the beautiful anarchy of its house-churches of human beings to build cathedrals of politicians. (Remember that cathedral means throne of a bishop.”) It lost the anarchical refusal of military service to mount armies bearing the banner of the cross and in this sign conquering. It lost its anarchical Jesus, whose kingdom was not of this world, to paint for itself venerated icons that needed labels before you could tell whether they were pictures of Christ or the Emperor (a sad, sad confusion). It lost its “holiness” in bestowing that title upon the empire instead of remembering the holiness of God. The trading of anarchy for a “Christian arky” was the deflowering of the church.

So, my great fear about today’s Christian revolution, out to transform and save the world for God, is not that it might fail but that it might succeed.

2. In This Corner: Arky Faith

In Chapter One we established the concept of Christian Anarchy. In this chapter we win turn to its opposite, what I call “Arky Faith.” Arky faith is that enthusiastic human self-confidence which is convinced that Christian piety can generate the holy causes, programs, and ideologies that will effect the social reformation of society. Differing only as to which actually are the holy causes, arky faith characterizes the Christian Right just as much as it does the Christian Left. In either case, the true believer has no doubt at all as to which arkys are the elect instruments for God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven.

The distinction between Christian Anarchy and arky faith may be as essential in defining true Christianity as any method ever proposed. Of course, the distinction won’t begin to correlate with the common theological one of “liberal” and “conservative.” None of the classic creeds or confessions is of any help in determining which—”anarchy” or “arky faith”—is orthodox and which heretical. Our study cuts in at a different level, addressing a new issue. The Bible (we have seen and will see) very definitely does speak to the matter, though Christian tradition as a whole has largely ignored it.

The problem with all arky faith (no matter what faith that may be) is in its self-image as opposed to the image of God. The pretentiousness of that self-image has perhaps nowhere been more tellingly exposed than in the line Tennyson gives to Sir Galahad: “My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.” Contrast this to Jesus’ statement: “So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty’“ (Luke 17:10).

There would seem to be no mystery as to why arky faith holds such appeal for us. Given the unquestioned certainty that our arkys are right, good, and dedicated to the service of God, three great advantages would seem to come from them:

1.     Arky faith greatly simplifies moral decision making. One escapes the ambiguity and terrible complexity of dealing with actual individuals who always are very much a mixture of good and evil, actual forces and situations that are very much the same way. Now one can think in terms of homogenous arky power-blocs that clearly classify into either good or bad; moralizing can be done sheerly by knee-jerk reflexing. So “pacifism” (of whatever character) is good and anything that is not pacifism is “evil warmongering.” A capitalist U.S. government is bad; a socialist Sandinista government is good. “Masculinity” is bad; “femininity” is good. The Moral Majority is bad; the National Council of Churches is good. Multinational corporations are bad; cottage industries are good. Moral choice becomes wonderfully uncomplicated when human affairs are understood simply in terms of a contest between the arkys wearing white hats and those wearing black. The trouble, of course, is that this way of doing morality bears no relationship to moral reality.

2.     Perfectly confident that our own commitments are to the “good,” we cannot see why it should be anything other than good that our power for good be “magnified” through the collective solidarities of good arkys. Nevertheless, the hard truth is that you, at most, are one—one individual—and no matter how pure you may be, you have no right to the strength of ten. That longs to nine other individuals—even if their hearts are not nearly as pure as yours. You have no right to lecture at a volume of “ten.” Those other nine people are to be allowed to speak even if you know that what they have to say is hogwash. The rule is “one person, one voice, one vote.” And it is every bit as wrong for piety to try to steamroller its “justice” into place as for perversity its “injustice.”

3.     I am convinced there are many Christians (of both the left and right) who, as individuals, are quite modest, humble, and of realistic self-image—but who, then, proceed to satisfy their lust for power; of grandeur, and their sense of self-righteousness through the holy arkys with which they identify. Asserting their “just cause” becomes a psychological disguise for asserting themselves; thus they find Christian justification for the sense of power by which all of us are tempted.

4.     Finally, one of the most alluring aspects of arky faith is what we have called “the trigger effect” and now call “the David and Goliath effect.” Still completely confident about the justice of our own cause, we dream about the possibility that, judiciously applied to the right spot, the power even of a small pebble from our weak sling will bring down the Goliath of Evil. The rock slinger may be a minority of one righteous individual, namely me (“God and one make a majority,” you know—for those of us bold enough to claim that where we are marks the spot where God is). Or the rock slinger may be the minority of our own small but holy cause group. Yet our faith (our arky faith) is that even a small power play at a key point in the dam can trigger the flood in which “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” Yet Amos (whose words these are [5:24]) was making a point the precise opposite of that of arky faith. It is very far from the mark to consider that our “justice” enough like God’s for one to trigger the other. No, Amos is saying, “Get out of there with your arky justice, religion, and piety. Your holy efforts are blocking God out, not helping him in. So step back and let justice (real justice) roll down like waters.”

5.     There is no doubt that the trigger effect does operate on the human scene. And it is indeed a sweet dream that we might be able to accomplish “so much good” just through our little holy effort. Wouldn’t God be delighted with us if we rose up, O men, women, and children of God, to trigger the day of brotherhood and end the night of wrong? In truth, is it not upon this trigger effect that all revolutionary action is premised—so much good, a sweeping reversal from evil to good, through our one holy pebble? “One person—namely, you—can make the difference!”

The hitch, of course, is that he who triggers the flood is going to have to take whatever flooding his triggering brings down. Once he has triggered his flood, he has no power to dictate its nature or even direct its course; “this thing is bigger than both of us.” And so, what the Maccabeen revolutionaries triggered did accomplish religious freedom and the liberation of the temple. But then, out control, the waters swept on to devastate the moral character of both the triggerers and their Jewish state. There was nothing wrong, either, with the Zealot plan: if they could trigger as much as general uprising against the Empire of Evil, then, they were certain, God’s Messiah would come rolling down with his flood of justice to eliminate the Romans, set up Israel as the first of the nations, and introduce the promised Day of the Lord. But, sad to say, the flood they actually got was only more, more, and more of Rome. Nothing wrong, again, with the plan to convert the emperor and thus revolutionize the empire. The plan worked, but the resultant flood went its own way—to the detriment of everything Christianity stood for.

The dream that our “justice” might trigger the rolling waters of God’s justice is indeed a sweet one—and one we will always find enticing. The pause is that any person presuming to use his power to trigger floods better also have at hand the power to control them—and that person, sad but true, is none of us.

The history of Christianity traces out rather clearly as a continuing contest to determine which arkys, at any given time, are actually holy agents of God.

As we saw in the previous chapter; Christian arky faith got its start in the absolute conviction that the elected arkys of God were two—the Holy Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Any other arkys (be they churches or states; be they pagan, heretical Christian, or whatever) were enemies of God to be ruthlessly conquered and exterminated.

(In the earlier stages of Christian history, all arky power apparently was perceived as being institutionalized in either the form of churches or states. Only recently have we come to see that there are a whole host of other institutions—education, business, the media, etc.—that are just as intent to govern human thought and behavior.)

The split-up of the empire, with its division of the Western church from the Eastern, did not change the character of arky faith. But now, within Christendom, we had two sets of Christian arkys—each absolutely certain that it was of God and that the other was of Evil. From this point forward (or backward, depending upon God’s opinion as to which way his church is going), the contest of arky election will take place as much or more within the church as between the church and the world.

The Protestant Reformation (i.e., the Magisterial or State Church Reformation, excluding the Anabaptists who played no part in this development) again fails to mark any significant change. The word magisteral betrays how strongly arky oriented that reformation was. The only thing new is that we now have a plethora of Christian State Churches in military combat with one another for confirmation of their election by God. Not too nice a picture.

It is, then, only as we move into denominational pluralism, the advent of secularism, the development of democratic government, and a breakup of the unholy union between church and state, that we see any significant change in the picture. Yet in no sense is that change a move away from arky faith toward Christian Anarchy. It is simply arky faith taking on its modern form.

Ecclesiastical monopoly within a society no longer being an option, each church had to learn to tolerate intermixture—even while retaining the secret (or not so secret) conviction that it was the elect in a way the others were not. State governments could no longer sport their state churches as proof of their divine election. But that was no bar to governments claiming election on their own merits (like, say, “this nation under God”).

However, with the new, democratic pluralism now making the standardised religion of an entire populace impossible, the denominations had to reformulate the nature and purpose of their arky power. No longer could it be domination by decree but now by propaganda. No longer could it be the power to grant whole populations salvation through the holy sacraments or the preaching of the holy word (or else, if they refuse it, damn them to hell). Now it had to be the power of institutional programs of evangelization, Christian nurture, moral instruction, and social reform that more subtly but just as powerfully get God’s will done on earth (or else, if people refuse it, let them go to hell). There is here no less confidence than before as to whose arky is appointed of God—and no less confidence than before that one particular arky carries the power that can save the world.

There is evidence in our day that given denominations are beginning to lose out as being the popular choice for “God’s anointed.” Some Christians see ecumenical councils and agencies as being the bigger and better arkys (more powerful and more effective) and so are pegging their hope and allegiance there. Some Christians see para-church organizations and “movements” (anything from Youth With a Mission to Sojourners) as being the arkys of God’s future. What it adds up to is that, from Constantine until now, church arky faith has completely carried the day.

Regarding the arky of civil government, the picture is no different. Though it is true that the Constantinian holy tandem church and state has largely disappeared, that was far from marking the end of faith in the divine election of government. Many German Christians, obviously, accepted the arky of the Third Reich as being of God. Today, many American Christians see the United States of America the same way (or else as that still-elect arky we are now in process of re-Christianizing).

Of course, there are also a great many Christians who laugh at this phenomenon, but that does not at all mean they have deserted arky faith. They deride the idea that any established rightist governments are elect of God—because they know that election already belongs to all revolutionary leftist governments that talk about social justice and reform. I say “talk,” because, by the time one can get around to an evaluation on the basis of performance, the true believer has already committed himself and has no option but to defend his choice. Yet, whether of the Right or the Left, the nature of arky faith is the same—the difference being only as to which arkys are of God and which of the devil.

My first inclination was to spot this as a modern development by citing Walter Rauschenbusch’s at-the-time opinion that the government of the Russian Revolution was God’s gift to the world as its best model of peace and brotherhood. (Rauschenbusch, a close companion of D.L.Moody, and translator of many evangelical hymns into German, was an American social reformer.) Then I realized that the phenomenon has been with us as good as forever. In a succeeding chapter, we will see how devout Jews of the second century B.C. embraced the Maccabean Revolt on the basis of its talk about social justice (quality, liberty, brotherhood, and peace) and how their compatriots of the first Christian century embraced the Zealot Revolution on the same basis.

Certainly, on the basis of its sweet talk, many Christians accepted the American Revolution as being of God. The French Revolution probably won the same sort of Christian blessing in its turn. Malcom Muggeridge has given us a fine account of how British Christians went ga-ga over the Russian Revolution, just as Rauschenbusch did. The Viet-Cong/North Vietnam “revolution” had its Christian following. There are still Christians affirming the godliness of the Cuban revolution, although people have become rather quiet about the Iranian revolution that unseated the Shah. And of course, the current favourite as “Christian arky” is the Sandinista revolution in Nicarugua—as on the Right it is that of the Reagan administration—each probably just as Christianly wrong as the other.

It is interesting that Christian proponents of revolutionary arky faith don’t particularly care whether a regime is pro-church or anti-church as long as it talks peace and justice. Obviously, some of these revolutions actually have produced more of what they talked about than have others. That is not the point. There is no reason even to argue whether those Christians are wiser or more stupid who are proclaiming the divine election of the Sandinista revolution than those who proclaimed the divine election of the Holy Roman Empire. It is the same mistake either way. The only question is whether there ever has been any human arky—church, state, cause group, or whatever—that has merited recognition as God’s chosen instrument of human salvation.

Looking at the entire history we have just traced, true Christian anarchists feel nothing but amazement and dismay at how far we have gotten off base. It is hard to know who to blame. All we can say is, “All we like sheep, have gone astray-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay.” And there is nothing to do about it but weep—or perhaps, better, laugh, at the ridiculousness of it all ... as a cover-up for our tears.

Within the foregoing history of Christendom, there are two churches, two Christian groupings in particular, that stand out as different. They are the New Testament church and the Anabaptists of the Protestant Reformation. I am not arguing that these are the only instances of true Christian Anarchy; yet my own interest and study brings them to focus. The New Testament already has been and will continue to be at the center of our attention, so it seems appropriate, here, to consider the Anabaptists.

Regarding the Christian Anarchy of that movement, the definitive study would seem to be James M. Stayer’s Anabaptism and the Sword (Coronado Press, 1976). Stayer never uses the term “anarchism” except in the political, “anti-arky” sense; but “Christian Anarchy” probably would have served him better than the terminology he does use. On page 1, he points out that, in the theological disputations of the sixteenth century, the term “the Sword” (from Rom. 13:4) regularly identified “all temporal force.” Stayer himself tends to narrow the reference to physical violence either by or against the civil state. His Anabaptist sources would be a bit more concerned also to keep the established church in the picture. Yet the theological issue itself invites us to broaden the term to cover the whole of what we have called “impositional pressure”—and so translate “the Sword” as “arky power.”

Stayer’s research clearly establishes that most of the early Anabaptist fellowships were self-consciously “anarchist” and knew themselves to be in general agreement with each other (even if differing slightly in their understanding of all Scripture). But there were also a few Anabaptist factions that held to a revolutionist arky faith rather than to Christian Anarchy. Some of these, apparently, were eager to take the sword as God’s instrument for overthrowing the powers and establishing the kingdom. Others would take it up much more reluctantly, hoping that God’s revolution could be accomplished more peaceably, by less violent means, and with a more limited use of power.

What Stayer uncovers here is what we have also seen in Jesus and Paul and in modern dissenters like Ellul. In a succeeding chapter we will find the pattern strongly enforced by Karl Barth.

It is true, Christian anarchists have always shared some ideals with revolutionaries, and some of them, in their weaker moments, have resorted to revolutionary methods to attain their goals. With left-wing revolutionists, Christian anarchists share the passion for justice and righteousness that insists the present order of our human establishment must be radically changed. However, the anarchists have no faith at all that the powers of human piety and wisdom are in any way competent to effect or control such change. That change must come from God. On this point, then, they show affinity with the conservative Right where, of course, emphasis upon the sovereignty of God is strong. Yet the anarchists are not at home there, either—because they can’t buy the conservative thesis that the present order of society is the one God wills for us. So, although Christian Anarchy does seem most often to he born out of the Left, it cannot be understood as a variety of either liberal or conservative Christianity. It is its own thing. And I, for one, would be just as happy to have the matter explained thusly: both the Left and the Right are corrupted versions of the original Christian Anarchy. Why not?

Aside from its fine presentation of primary sources regarding the position of different Anabaptist leaders on “the Sword,” Stayer’s book is most helpful by including similar material regarding different ones of the non-Anabaptist reformers. Thus, he can help us clarify the distinctions between Christian Anarchy and differing types of arky faith. In the following, therefore, Stayer provides most of the information, although the interpretation and application are mine:

·       Martin Luther (Stayer, pp.33-44): Surprisingly enough, on the basis of Luther’s published position on “the Sword” (and particularly his exposition of Romans 13), Stayer finds him to be closer to anarchical Anabaptists than is any other of the Reformers. Luther comes off sounding not completely unlike what we already heard from the Blumhardts and Ellul and what we will hear from Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

See, these people [the Christians] need no worldly Sword or law. And if the whole world were true Christians—genuine believers, I mean—no prince, king, lord, Sword, or law would be necessary or useful. (P. 37)

The temporal authority does not at all belong to the charge of Christ but is an external thing, like all other offices and estates. (P.38)

Follow the gospel and suffer injustice to yourself and your possessions as befits true Christians. (P. 43)

Dominion and Kingship shall remain to the Last Day, but then all official powers will be abolished, both the temporal and the spiritual. (P. 44)

This, of course, is not the whole picture of Luther on the Sword. It is, however, enough to show a truly anarchistic scepticism that anything of God’s good can ever be expected from human arkys. Consequently, Stayer awards Luther the label “moderate apoliticism,” as against the “radical apoliticism” of the Anabaptists. But what Stayer fails to consider is Luther’s practise along with his theory. Do this once and, I contend, Luther is forever removed from consideration as a Christian anarchist. Quite the contrary, he takes on an arky faith of specific coloring.

Luther was of a staunchly conservative turn of mind and so shows up as regularly legitimizing the power of establishment arkys. In practise, he is not “apolitical” in any sense of the term. He turns to the “princes” and their Sword to have them gain for him legal standing for his Protestant church and protect it from its enemies (clearly a case of using worldly arky to forward what he is convinced the world is God’s work in the world). Although he knows very well that anarchical ekklesia represents the truly Christian form of the church (admitting this in so many words in his book The German Mass and Order of Worship), for prudential reasons he chooses to retain the structures of state-church arky. He preaches the priesthood of all believers but practices a hard-and-fast arky-power distinction between clergy and laity. He fears anything that smells of revolution and so blesses the princes in their brutal putting down of peasant revolutionaries—and the Anabaptist “fanatics” whom he perceives as being of the same spirit. Luther clearly believes that conservative, establishment arkys play a vital role in God’s plan for humanity.

There is an entirely true and praiseworthy concern behind this faith of Luther’s. He cares about what happens to people. For instance, in that German Mass passage, he rejects the New Testament concept of a gathered ekklesia explicitly because he realizes that only a few people ever would choose to join such groups and, in effect, this would be to leave the masses outside the salvation of the church. For Luther; the stability of a powerful established order was the only thing holding human sin in check and thus making possible a liveable society. Whether he was right or wrong in this, his conservative, legitimizing arky faith is credible and deserving of all respect.

·       Thomas Müntzer (leader of the peasant revolt in southern Germany, Stayer, pp.73-90): Müntzer’s is an arky faith the polar opposite of Luther’s. He is the sixteenth-century representative of today’s “theology of liberation.” For him, revolution against establishment arky in behalf of the poor and oppressed is God’s Sword manifesting itself in history. It is true that the Peasants’ War supported by Müntzer came to the same sorry end as the pre-Jesus Maccabean Revolt and the post-Jesus Zealot Revolt. Yet it is indubitable that all three of these were totally “just” revolutions, turning to violence only because there was no other alternative. Müntzer was every bit as sincere and religious as Luther—and had just as credible an argument for his position.

·       Desiderius Erasmus (Dutch humanist, educated by the Brothers of the Common Life, Stayer, pp. 52-56): Erasmus had considerable influence on Ulrich Zwingli (our next case), but his thought is different enough to constitute a separate category. Erasmus can be understood as the first proponent of twentieth-century America’s Social Gospel. Although it is not immediately apparent as such, his is another form of revolutionary arky faith (not entirely unlike Müntzer’s). What Erasmus advocated was a “nonviolent, pacifist revolution.” Consequently, the arky upon which his faith centered was what might be called Jesus-Piety. Jesus was to be followed as the perfect teacher and exemplar of the way of love. And Erasmus’s faith, then, was the conviction that the arky of such pacifistic humanism is God’s chosen vehicle for making the world right.

To the present day, it is undoubtedly this form of arky faith that is most tempting to the Christian Left and most easily confused with Christian Anarchy. Yet the difference between them is as fundamental as this: Christian Anarchy is based on the conviction that no human arky can serve God’s ultimate will for humanity, that only God’s own not-of-this-world arky will do. Erasmianism, on the contrary, places its ultimate faith in the conviction that, for the bringing in of his kingdom, God has committed himself to the political arky-power of human pacifistic piety. However, even with that distinction, there is no question about the sincerity and truly Christian dedication of an Erasmus.

·       Ulrich Zwingli (Stayer, pp.49-69): Zwingli is the reformer with whom the Anabaptists had the most direct contact and within whose Zurich church Anabaptism originated. Zwingli’s, too, is a faith in the arky of Christian piety; but he believes Erasmus’s ideas to be too naive and simplistic to succeed within the hard realities of a sinful world. So, Zwingli is still the somewhat Erasmian vision of Christian piety gradually revolutionizing the world for good. Yet he knows this will take the combined arky efforts of his Zurich established church and the Zurich city council—and that with some well-directed political clout. He hopes he can keep the process peaceful but is prepared to go beyond peaceful means where that proves necessary. He is not a Müntzer who welcomes the Sword as the instrument of God’s justice—yet neither is he an Erasmus who renounces it in the conviction that human livingness is capable of winning its own way. Zwingli is realistic enough to know that his goal is not the bringing in of the kingdom but only the Christianizing of Zurich. So, as with the others, there is no doubt about the credibility and authentic Christian conviction of Zwingli’s pragmatic arky faith.

Of the four we have presented, Luther’s vision is obviously the most pessimistic—although, perhaps by the same token, also the most realistic. His legitimized establishment has held society together (sort of), which is as much as he ever hoped from it. Zwingli’s is the most optimistic—although I don’t know that Zurich has ever had a viable claim to being a “Christian” city. The visions of Müntzer and Erasmus, though apparently poles apart, are equally idealistic—each counting not so much upon the amassing of real power as upon the David-and-Goliath “triggering” effect and the purity of heart that magnifies strength tenfold.

Each of the four positions has a valid rationale. It could be debated as to which scheme is the most workable. I don’t believe it is possible to determine which is the most “Christian”—any of the four having difficulty developing a biblical basis. Yet, in spite of all their obvious differences, the four do have in common the conviction that there is a human arky (better: a particular type of arky) which is “holy,” which God has elected as the means through which his will shall be done on earth (and for earth) as it is in is in heaven.

·       Anabaptism: Not particularly in its being “apolitical” but in its being “anarchical” (i.e., lacking the faith that any human arky has a select role to play in God’s plan of salvation), Anabaptism is radically distinguished from any and all of the visions above. It stands outside the spectrum of arky faith.

A more recent work of Stayer’s throws further light on the matter. The title of his article, “The Revolutionary Origins of the’Peace Churches’“ (Brethren Life & Thought, Spring 1985), could just as accurately have read, “The Anti-Revolutionary Origins....” For the thesis he so convincingly argues is that both sixteenth-century Anabaptism and seventeenth-century Quakerism represent the Christian, theological rebound following a gross failure of justice in a political revolution that had been seen as holding great promise. These “rebounders,” then, wind up in a quite anti-revolutionary stance of anarchism and nonresistance, i.e., in what Stayer, from the 1527 Schleitheim Confession, typifies as “shunning all established churches and all governments [which is to say, the powers of both Right and Left, Establishment and Revolution]—all their worship services and their ‘diabolical weapons of violence.”’

The completely proper and biblical conclusion drawn by these people was this: It has become apparent that no program of human power politics can be the method of social justice—in that sinful humanity is simply incapable of exercising impositional power without being corrupted by it. Therefore, we must look away from the powers of this world and turn to God as the one true source and hope of justice. With the Anabaptists, of course, the revolutionary disillusionment was that of the Peasants’ War in Germany. With the Quakers, it was the Puritan Revolution. But I think Stayer is onto a pattern that shows up all over the place.

It might be said that Christian Anarchy exists to no other purpose than to rebound people toward God’s justice once their hope has been shattered by the discovery of how treacherous and untrustworthy is any attempt at imposing our human justice upon the world.

However, in response to this analysis, Stayer still finds it important to stress that, nonetheless, all these Christian anarchists had been or were very close to being revolutionists.

Amen. It is precisely the undeniable “political” resemblance (the commitment to peace, justice, freedom, and human welfare) between leftist revolutionism and true Christian Anarchy that makes it so very crucial for us to spot the radical “theological” opposition between the two.

What gives me such great concern is to find the leadership of my own Anabaptist-Brethren-Mennonite tradition moving out of its time-tested anarchism and into today’s dead-end revolutionism. Therefore, I hereby dedicate this book to hastening the inevitable revolutionary disillusionment that might bring these people back to the Christian Anarchy to which they belong.

The New Testament church and the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century display five basic characteristics in common and in contrast to all forms of arky faith:

a.     Neither gives a hint of wanting to legitimize any of the powers that be. Those all exist by God’s sufferance; none can boast of his blessing.

b.     Neither shows any inclination to fight the arkys (even those perceived as most wicked) nor to compete with them (whether physically or verbally). There is no felt need to be knocking heads with them or trying to get power over them. It is not in any such contest that the future of the race is being decided.

c.     Neither shows any interest in making something of itself in the eyes of the world—getting its power consolidated, finding organizational structures that will make it most effective and influential. Both are content to be quite weak and, shall we say, anarchistic.

d.     Neither makes any big claims (or even small promises) about what it intends to do in the way of governing, saving, correcting, or even improving a lost and wrong world. Neither makes the sound of a candidate for office.

e.     Most of all, both show complete confidence that God can and will accomplish whatever he has in mind for his world, with or without their help. At his pleasure, God can use either arkys or anarchys, arkyists or anarchists. But he needs neither and, most definitely, licenses none.

I had it in mind now to use the book of Revelation as depiction of the early church’s understanding of Christian Anarchy and a means of documenting the five points just made. Yet surely many people would think this book so revealing of arky battle to be the very last place one would expect to find any hint of anarchism. So perhaps the best way of making this transition is to meet the problem head-on, by addressing the comparison between Romans 13 and Revelation 13 that is found with some regularity in the literature of the Christian Left.

That comparison most often is done to establish the contextualist nature of the Christian relationship to the state: when a state is behaving well, then Christians should respect, obey, and honor it; when it is nasty, then Christians are obligated to denounce, resist, and try to revolutionize it. The Christian response to government all depends upon how the government of the moment is behaving itself.

From this point of view, Romans 13 is read as quite legitimizing. The explanation is that, at the time of Paul’s writing, the Roman Empire was in one of its more benevolent phases, making it natural for him to tell Roman Christians that they should obey the authorities, pay their taxes, and all. Revelation 13, then, is seen to be the opposite case. There the empire is portrayed as the Beast from the Abyss—which is taken to indicate that, at the time of John’s writing, the empire’s behaviour was quite different from what it had been in Paul’s day. I will leave it for the reader to guess whether it is a Romans-13 or a Revelantion-13 phase these interpreters presently find the U.S. Government to be in.

Yet truth to tell, the evidence won’t begin to support this interpretation at either end of the comparison. First, the Romans-13 end: Paul does not express or imply any sort of legitimizing, any sort of approval, any recognition of merit on the part of the secular state. It is incredible, in fact, that Paul ever could have looked upon the Roman Empire as “benevolent.” There is nothing in his Jewish background, his personal history; or the political situation of his time that would hint at his intending Romans 13 to be taken like that.

Moving, then, to the Revelation-13 end of the comparison: First, there is no evidence that the Beast described in Revelation 13 is to be identified as the Roman Empire. Clearly, the Revelator is here in process of introducing the three members of the Evil Trinity that are the negative spiritual counterparts of the three of the Holy Trinity. The Beast, then, is Anti-Christ, the negative of God the Son. John’s imagery throughout the book rather easily sorts out into that representing spiritual, heavenly entities and that representing earthly reality; With his dual trinities he is plainly on the spiritual level—and it is to make John break all his own rules to try to equate this Beast with the historical, earthly actuality of Rome.

However; the real argument against the contextualist Romans 13/Revelation 13 comparison is that John—have him call Rome whatever names you will—simply does not go on to suggest that Christians should therefore resist, withhold their taxes or do anything else in opposition to this monster. There is nothing of that sort in the book anywhere. Actually, John’s counsel as to what Christians should do in their situation takes two parts. Firstly, (and repeatedly), they are asked to bear patiently whatever injustice and suffering comes upon them by keeping faithful to Jesus. There is certainly no hint of revolution there.

Secondly, in the midst of the fall of the Babylon-whore, there comes the counsel, “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins” (18:4). My understanding, based upon John’s ways of thinking throughout the book, is that this is not a historical-point-in-time command regarding some group’s making a geographical move. It is, rather, God’s everyday command to every one of his people: “Today, come out from the arkys; separate yourself (spiritually and psychologically) lest you get yourself entangled and go down with them. Their fall takes place every day (which is not to deny that there will also be a final fall of the final day), and your coming-out must also take place every day.”

Turn that one any way you will and, again, it can’t be made to spell anything like “revolution.” In fact, what those two counsels do add up to is Christian Anarchy: “Be entirely unarkycal by continuing coming out from the arkys—and the only way to keep yourself clear is by sticking close, remaining ever faithful, to Jesus.”

What it comes to is that the texts themselves simply can’t be made to produce any sort of tension or disagreement between Romans and Revelation. There is no evidence that Paul felt good and John felt bad about the empire. Let John speak of the empire as he will; the evidence is that Paul would be the first to agree. Paul says that Christians should pay their taxes, but John certainly never suggests that they should withhold them. Paul discourages revolution, but John certainly never encourages it. Paul says, “Christian Anarchy is where it’s at,” and John says, “Amen, brother!”

So, back to Revelation and its big picture of Christian Anarchy. Therein, Babylon—the symbolic total of arkydom—false time and again. That is, presumably it falls once (one continuous fall that has caught up every arky thus far), but that one fall is announced or described two or three times. Yet this Babylonian arky falls in a very anarchical way: it is never attacked by anyone or by any force—not even by the arky of God, let alone the arky of the church or that of any holy revolution. It simply collapses under the weight of its own evil—just as Christian Anarchy would suggest it should.

Then John wants to portray Jesus’ final victory over all evil—God’s arky over Satan’s arky, as it were. He hasn’t much choice except to use arky battle imagery, but he manages to do it without involving any actual arky contest at all. In his first go at it (16:12-17 on pp. 149-52), the arkys of evil are mustered at Armageddon, ready to take on the Lord God himself. Yet without any godly arkys so much as taking the field, the bullhorn from the squad car announces, “OK, boys! It’s over!” And it is. Again, the day carried anarchically. God’s arky is not of this world—which means he can take out evil without the help of worldly arkys or without even using his own arky in a worldly way. And the reason the Revelator won’t portray Jesus as going into battle at this point is that he knows Jesus has already won it all at Calvary; the most anarchic battle of all.

In his second go at the scene (19:11-20:3 on pp.173-79), the Revelator presents Jesus as the Warrior King on a white horse (arky imagery, for sure). His forces take the field. The arkys of evil come on to face him—and promptly are taken prisoner and fed to the vultures without any battle being recounted at all. Apparently, the arkys of the world recognize that the Warrior King’s bloody garments identify him as the Lamb who, in letting himself be bloodied at Calvary, had, once and for all, whipped them on the spot. And with that, all the fight immediately goes out of them. Consistently, John shows God’s victory for the world as taking place without any assistance from our holy human arky efforts. And if God does not want or need such, we can afford to be the little anarchists he has called us to be.

Once more, in his finale, the Revelator as much as bends over backward to dispute the prophet Ezekiel. “I’ve been there since you were,” he says, “and I saw NO temple in the New Jerusalem” (21:22 on p.199). And why so great a “no”? Because John knows that temples and the whole apparatus of institutional religion are human arkys claiming to be able to put worshipers in touch with God. Now, in John’s picture, the whole of the New Jerusalem is the church; so he is not equating “church” (gathered people) with the “temple” of arky apparatus. We are the ones so confused as to think that you can’t have one without the other. Yet, where God himself is present, who needs it? He can be his own temple; human arkys are the last thing wanted.

So the book of Rcvelation knows all about the principalities and powers of arkydom—yet it knows nothing of the common faith alignment that divides human arkys into two categories (the “good” ones sponsored by God and the “bad” ones by Satan) which are then pitted against each other in determining humanity’s future. No, in Revelation, all human arkys are of a kind (showing only very relative moral distinction); it is this totality of human arkydom the Arky of God finally will overcome by ways and means of his own loving and redemptive discipline.

Humanity’s blessed end is to be a total anarchy—the escape from damned arky rather than the victory of any portion of it. Arkys have no ultimate significance or even lasting function. And, the New Testament tells us, if our final end is Christian Anarchy, it can’t be wrong to start exercising and enjoying a bit of it now—by ever and always “coming out of her; my people!”

3: Churchly Arkydom: It’s Unreal

Would it be correct to say that, given his status as Creator and Lord, God’s definition of reality (of what is real and what is unreal) is truer than ours? Could we say, even, that it is not for us to decide whether God is for real but for him to decide whether we are?

Therefore, having discovered that God is the first and greatest Anarchist, the best one around, it should come as no surprise that his is a most anarchical view of the human scene, one not at all inclined to deal with humanity in terms of its arky structures. Regarding this human race of ours, we can be certain he sees its essential reality as residing in the existence of the individual human individuals who are every bit as real as the individual sparrows he watches, the very hairs of whose heads (the humans, of course, not the sparrows) are numbered. That “he careth for [each and every] one of you” (1 Pet. 5:7) is indisputable. That he careth a hoot about—or even recognizeth the reality of—any arky arrangement superior to individual existence is never said.

We will proceed, now, to speak only of the arkys of churchliness, although the argument could apply to any and all secular arkys as well. However, right off the bat it must be insisted that what we are calling God’s concept of “individualistic reality” does in no way deny or even threaten the social concept of “church”—as long as “church” be properly defined.

When it is the church with which we are dealing, there is a complicating factor that can always confuse our analysis. I mean to focus on the two major components of the church that come “from below” to constitute its “human” side. The first of these is the ekklesia, the “gathering” of the individual saints (better: the sainted individuals) into community. The second is all the institutional, cultic arky structure of house of worship, priesthood, ritual, organization, polity, and what all.

What dare not be overlooked is that, being the church of God, it also involves a third, transcendent, “from above” component that takes priority over the other two. However, for us now to try to define this “divine” component and then detail how it relates to and operates within the human two—such an investigation would lead us far from our intended track and undoubtedly bog us down in complete disagreement. So, in the effort simply to set that issue to one side rather than even try to settle it, let us, without prejudice, call that third component “the Holy Spirit in our midst” and move on to our analysis of the human side of the church.

As long as the church is defined as ekklesia, i.e., the assembly of the (individual) saints, there is no problem. Here there is not only room for, but even the need for, whatever one cares to call it in the way of fellowship—koinonia, Gemeinschaft, bodyhood, or community. The only thing these ideas add to “individualistic reality” is “togetherness.” And “togetherness” is not a new category, nothing that is transcendent or standing superior to individual existence. It is, instead, a natural form, a function of individual existence. There is no such thing as “community” except when individuals (as individuals) are doing it. As ekklesia (and nothing more than ekklesia), “church” is still a totally anarchic concept; no hint of arkydom involved.

Where the line is crossed into arkydom is the point at which it is assumed that a grouping of individuals can be given the quantitative value of their sum and then treated as a collective solidarity represented by a corporate head.

From our Western culture we have inherited one of the profound nuggets of human wisdom, namely, that “you can’t add apples and oranges.” Actually, of course, apples can be added (on the one pile) and oranges added (on the other); the two can even be added together (as long as what one counts is “fruit”). No, it is only with God’s hair-numbered humans that we run into true unaddability. But the one mathematical count God will not “countenance” is to add up, say, fifty-three human ones (“1”s) and get a sum, a new number of, say, “53 and upwards,” which is itself larger and more powerful than any of the constituent “1”s or all of them put together. The fact is that God has created human beings to be unaddable: “you can’t add individuals and individuals.” Any “1” in there (even the tiniest) is itself infinitely larger than the “53” that purports to be their sum. To glom people into a collective (and “glom” is a perfectly good word, based on the very widespread Indo-European root meaning “to mash together into a “ball,” as in conglomeration”)  never works, as the arkys suppose, to human magnification—always to human degradation.

Yet the invariable method of arky power is to glom such human collectives into being and then to anoint special individuals who presume to represent that body, speak for it, act in behalf of it, stand in place of it. Of course, God himself can work like this—as he did in Jesus Christ. Yet this is to slip over into the entirely different sphere of “the third component.” The question is whether he has given permission for us to do anything of this sort for ourselves. I wouldn’t even deny that humanity has worked itself into a place where it can’t operate in any other way. Yet the question remains as to whether God himself ever wills or blesses the manoeuvre.

Thus, within the Judaic tradition of the Bible, we find the two concepts of “church” standing side by side. The temple signifies the arky, “churchly” one and the synagogue the anarchic, “ekklesial” one. The temple cult, of course, was based entirely upon the arky premise that there are special, anointed agents (priests) who are capable of representing all Israel before God—and that in total disregard of the actual faith-status of any given Israelite and complete ignorance even of what percentage of individual Israelites might at the moment be believing or unbelieving. Such a priest was more than an individual in that he could “represent” the “summated being” of the corporation before God. And he could perform, in behalf of other (lay) individuals, actions of cultic effectiveness before God—actions that no lay individual was capable of performing for himself.

Israel, in such case, obviously is not being considered as an ekklesia, a community of individual existences, but as some sort of arky entity which can be represented to God as a collective solidarity and responded to by God en masse. There is now no reason God even needs an individual hair-count. For his convenience, we have gotten ourselves organized so that his salvation can proceed through arky transaction rather than on any person-by-person basis. My question is whether God had any part in that scheme, whether he ever recognizes any reality other than that of individuals—be they sparrows or otherwise.

With the synagogue, these arky presuppositions are not so. A synagogue is nothing more nor less than the place of the ekklesia, the gathering of the faithful. It is the place where—although they do it together (and I would never minimize the significance of that)—it is still each individual doing his own studying and hearing of the word, his own praying, his own worshiping, his own relating to God, his own performing as a member of the body. The rabbi is a teacher and in no sense a priest. He is only one member of the congregation and can no more represent or speak for it than any other one member can. No “official,” arky privilege before God claimed or wanted.

Clearly, the course of God’s way with Israel—beginning with the prophets—was away from temple arky and toward the anarchic reality of the synagogue. In its turn, Christianity started out as a completely anarchic ekklesia and then drifted into churchly arkydom.

The treatment above might suggest that the issue is one of the power and the authority of a priesthood. Surely, those issues are involved, but the question is much broader and more profound. It can be put as simply as this: Who is entitled to speak for whom—and by what authority?

I guess to be the father of a family (pater familias) is as much of arky status as I have any claim to. Well, then, does being pater familias mean that I can “speak for” the family? Don’t you believe it! The very idea is an impossible one. It implies that, somehow, above and beyond and independence of the various minds of the individual members, the family has a common mind to which I, as pater familias, have access and thus am empowered to speak “for the family.” No way. I can speak “for the family” only to the extent that every member gives me both permission to speak for him and the voluntary assent that what I say is indeed an expression of his individual mind as well. If so much as one family member as lowly as Cricket the Cat thinks differently (and when he thinks at all, you can know it will be differently), even thought I am pater familias, I am still hung up in speaking “for the family” without impermissibly overriding his sacred individuality.

The family has no common mind, no higher mind, no singular mind transcending the plural and various minds of its individual members. If there is no single mind, there certainly is no arky figure who can claim to represent the family as a whole in speaking it. No arky entity ever takes precedence over individual existence; no one can speak for another except at the other’s permission and instruction.

I haven’t any doubt that God recognizes “families” as “individuals in configured relationship with each other.” I deny that he grants reality to any idea of “family” which, without reference to the independent mind of each and every constituent member, posits the sort of solidarity that would even make it possible for one special individual to “represent” or “speak for” the whole. Thus, it is precisely “the great realities of our day” (according to arky faith) which turn out to have no real existence in the eyes of our anarchist Father who art in heaven.

We will turn now to specific examples documenting how completely churchly arkydom operates in terms of these abstractions. The easiest and most obvious example would be Roman Catholicism, with its hierarchical polity culminating in one extra-special individual who is presumed to have the power, before God, to represent (stand in place of) and speak for hundreds of millions of actual individuals—and with its sacramental system in which a quite special person, before God, can gain access to grace for a multitude in a way no other member of the group can. The trouble, of course, is that such an example would let Protestants off the hook with a blithe, “But our church isn’t that way.” So I am choosing, rather, to take our examples from the World Council of Churches and its recent assembly at Vancouver, British Columbia.

We shall give attention to one of the “biggies” from that event. The German theologian, Dorothee Sölle, addressed one session of the conference. That much is the truth of what took place, but the significance, the power which the churchly arky (with the aid of the media arky) immediately pumped in was to make it read, “WOMAN Addresses World Council of CHURCHES.”

My opinion is that the anarchist God—who recognizes no human reality beyond that of individuals—is fully aware that one human individual named Dorothee Sölle addressed a gathering of so many other human individuals named Variously. He could even give you an as-of-that-moment hair-count for each. But I also am of the opinion that as soon as the situation was projected into terms of abstract entities, God would say we had traded human reality for arky unreality.

Sölle can’t represent “woman,” “women,” or “women in general,” because there isn’t any such entity. There are in the world only scads of female individuals—with as many minds as there are females. Certainly, there is no one idea upon which the total group would agree—not even (or perhaps least of all) that women are systematically misused by men. There is absolutely no collective solidarity that even would make it possible for Sölle (or any woman, or any group of women) ever to “represent” or “speak for” an entity that doesn’t exist. Sölle (or anyone else) can represent only as many individuals as have asked her to represent them and have given their personal approval to what she shall say.

Yes, I know I am talking about what is called “a symbolic event.” What I am questioning is whether there exists any reality corresponding to the symbol. For a symbol to work, there has to be some reality somewhere in the mix.

Can God be anything but unhappy, then, after he created people for human individuality, to have their individuality overridden in the interests of glomming them into collective solidarities for purposes of arky power? So, just as “woman” was not present at Vancouver in the person of Dorothee Sölle, neither were any “churches” present in the bodies of dignitaries, officers, or delegates. To suggest that, in God’s eyes, something significant regarding “women in the church” took place at Vancouver is to take arky abstraction for human reality.

My guess is that God, at the Vancouver conference, was listening and interested at an entirely different point from what the churchly audience and media magnifiers were. I doubt whether he even caught the symbolic significance of “women in the church” (since, in any case, he already knows the actual status of each woman in the church). No, given his overweening concern about what is going on with individuals, it seems likely that his main interest would have been: “What is the state of Sölle’s personal relationship with me? What does she believe and do? Is she, as an individual ready to meet me when she dies? What is she saying to this group of people and what effect will it have on every individual present?

Be clear; I am not at all suggesting that the WCC should have made Sölle’s faith an arky concern, with committee investigations, heresy trials, excommunications, and what all. I mean only to suggest that God on the one hand and churchly arkydom on the other apparently operate on completely different wavelengths regarding what is truly real and central to Christianity. The assembly likes generalized, all-inclusive, large-symboled, arky-powerful, headline grabbing pronouncements about WOMEN in the CHURCH. But God, anarchically disinterested in all that, goes for the loving concern as to what is the state of faith of this daughter of his, this one particular “woman in the church” who is infinitely more real and important to him than all the symbolic abstractions churchly arkydom has ever invented. So as it turns out, what the WCC regards as a “biggie” God doesn’t even recognize as being for real. And what God finds most important the WCC scarcely notices.

Let us now turn our attention to the “churches” that supposedly were present at Vancouver to hear Sölle. Although they acted with somewhat more dignity, there nevertheless was that about them suggestive of a presidential nominating convention. A least the polity of procedure was the same. You’ve seen it: Some slap-happy pipsqueak in a crazy hat gets hold of the microphone, and then we hear, “Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman! THE GREAT STATE OF N’YAWK goes for the next President of the United States, Senator Ted Kennedy!” The guy’s own conviction convinces all the rest of us that this is for real, that he actually is wielding the representational arky power of THE GREAT STATE OF N’YAWK to determine the course of the nation and, through it, the world. Very many people undoubtedly give more credence to his weighty words than to those of the Revelator: ‘The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.” The politician at least spoke with the votes in his pocket, while John had nary a one.

Once more, let’s look at the situation through the eyes of God rather than those of oh-ye-of-arky-faith. God knows, of course, that he has a goodly batch of individuals living in the area; he may even know that there are boundaries setting it off as a state named New York. But that there are a handful of politicians who, by means of “representation,” can speak for and wield the awesome power of some world-shaping, individual-transcending arky-conglomerate known as THE GREAT STATE OF N’YAWK—well, I doubt whether that has come to his attention. In any case, he surely would have to “come down” in order to see it, as the account tells us he had to do to see the Tower of Babel. We know that his eye is on the sparrow; but whether he can keep it there and at the same time see THE GREAT STATE OF N’YAWK (which obviously has no head the hairs of which it would even be possible to number and perhaps not even any real existence at all), that is another question.

If that is how it is with THE GREAT STATE OF N’YAWK, how is it, say, with THE LUTHERAN CHURCH? No different. It is not to be doubted, of course, that God keeps track of each and every member of the body of Christ (as he does even of its nonmembers). He may even be aware that some millions of these are called “Lutherans”—no matter what they call each other. But that these millions of Lutherans can then be glommed together into a corporate solidarity called “Lutheranism,” from which is squeezed out the power-essence to anoint a representative who can go to Vancouver and be THE LUTHERAN CHURCH—that I doubt. “My strength is as the strength of tens of millions, because my heart is pure Lutheranism!”

Therefore, though it was called a council of CHURCHES and very much hyped as such, I am skeptical that God saw any of them at Vancouver. What he did see was an ekklesia of individual Christians. And in the anarchist eyes of God that, in any case, is a far greater reality than a council of nonexistent churches.

Note, if you will, that mine has been quite a different critique of the WCC than any seen heretofore. Rather than taking one side or the other, mine would apply to all the critics of WCC just as much as to the WCC itself. My anarchist quarrel pointed no more toward the WCC than toward any other arky. Nonetheless, there would seem no denying that the WCC was an outstanding demonstration of the pomp and circumstance of self-advertised churchly arkydom. I don’t even know that the WCC could be any different. My only point is that it represents a way of “seeing” which is totally other than keeping one’s eye upon the sparrow.

So, if Christian Anarchy identifies a skepticism regarding everything “arky faith” represents, we here are getting at an essential principle. We are back with Blumhardt: “I am proud to stand before you as a man; and if politics cannot tolerate a human being, then let politics be damned.” Human individuals, by all means; political conglomerates, never!

Anarchists—whether divine or human—hold that individuals in ekklesia (i.e., in that setting which best serves and preserves their individuality) represent the highest human reality there is. Thus, whenever any arkydom treats them, rather, as “clods” to be glommed together into “mountains” (which God knows to be “molehills”), this represents a degradation of humanity and not a magnification of it.

Anarchist Kierkegaard saw this principle even earlier and more clearly than Blumhardt did. Now, among us, Kierkegaard (with Ellul) regularly gets accused of promoting an “individualism” that is detrimental to any social concept of “church.” However, that accusation is accurate depending entirely upon what one means by “church.” “Church” as an ekklesia of individuals, they are all for. “Church” as holy arky, they anarchistically despise.

Kierkegaard could state the matter formally and philosophically:

It is not the individual’s relationship to the congregation which determines his relationship to God, but his relationship to God which determines his relationship to the congregation. Ultimately, in addition, there is a supreme relationship in which “the individual” is absolutely higher than the “congregation.”

Or again:

Nothing, nothing, nothing, no error, no crime is so absolutely repugnant to God as everything which is official [call it “arky”]; and why? Because the official is impersonal and therefore the deepest insult which can be offered to a personality.”

Kierkegaard could describe “hierarchy” (pronounced “higher archy”) in terms of a pyramid:

Man is a social being, and what he believes in is the power of union. So man’s thought is, “Let us all unite”—if it were possible, all the kingdoms and countries of the earth, with this pyramid-shaped union always rising higher and higher, supporting at its summit a super-king whom one may suppose to be nearest to God, in fact so near to God that God cares about him and takes notice of him. In Christian terms the true state of affairs is exactly the reverse of this. Such a super-king would be the farthest from God, just as the whole pyramid enterprise is utterly repugnant to God. What is despised and rejected by men, one poor rejected fellow, an outcast, this is what in Christian in terms is chosen by God, is nearest to him. He hates the whole business of pyramids.

Or he could capsulate and conclude our treatment by affirming its thesis that arkydom is unreal:

The more the phenomenon, the appearance, expresses that God cannot possibly be there, the nearer he is. . . .  The law for God’s farness (and this is the history of Christianity) is therefore that everything that strengthens the appearance makes God distant. At the time when there were no churches, but the handful of Christians gathered as refugees and persecuted people in catacombs, God was nearer to reality. Then came churches, so many churches, such large and splendid churches—and to the same degree God is made distant.

4. On Selective Sin and Righteousness

In Scripture, it is only Jesus who can say, “He who is not with me is against me.” The assumption that one must either absolutize the state-arky as a god or else absolutize it as a satan is utterly false. Jesus asks us to absolutize God alone and let the state and all other arkys be the human relativities they are, at once relatively good and relatively evil—even as you and I are.

The choosing of God—and only this choice—is absolute in that everything else hangs on it. Only here does “your whole body” become full of either light or darkness.

The choice is absolute in that it is the only true “life and death choice,” the only “black and white choice,” the only choice between light and darkness (to use Jesus’ own terminology). Between “God” and “the world” there is no natural connection, no possibility of gradual transition, no shadings of gray, no middle ground, nothing shared in common between the two ends of the choice. Here and only here are we invited—or even permitted—to “hate the one and love the other, be devoted to the one and despise the other.”

This choice—and only this choice—is absolute in that there is no room for dialogue or discussion between the poles, no room for seeking what is true and good in each, for effecting any sort of reconciliation or compromise. Here there can be no conversation (as there could be none when Jesus chose not to debate Pilate), for when God is that which is to be chosen, “To whom then will you compare me?”—as it is put in Isaiah 40:25. No, all one can do is choose and choose absolutely—“let goods and kindred go; this mortal life also.”

Once one has absolutely chosen God—it needs to be said—then it is perfectly proper to turn to the world and find all sorts of relative values there. Thus the issue is not the customary one of being either world-rejecting or world-affirming; it is rather the question of primacy—who is master, God or the world?

Now the root sin of arky-faith’s zealotism is the penchant for absolutizing what are actually relative choices, for treating as vertical those alignments that are actually horizontal. The contest between two different “not-God” positions is treated as though it involves a choosing of “God,” as though one of the positions were the position of “God” and only the other a “not-God” position.

However, the truth of the matter is that relative choices represent an entirely different alignment from the absolute choice and must be approached in an entirely different manner. God, of course, has the right to demand that every person choose him or, in failing to do so, choose the world. We have no right to demand that anyone choose between our humanly defined alternatives. Being humanly defined, the alternatives we set up are never black and white; at best, they are only differing shades of gray. It is hardly our place, then, to suggest that people must choose what we define as “the True Church” or else be damned as part of what we define as “the fallen Church,” choose what we define as “conservatism” or else be damned as what we call “a liberal,” choose what we define as “the Revolution” or else be damned according to our definition of “the Establishment.”

Just the opposite of the way it is with the absolute choice, relative choices—in their comparative grayness—must recognize the essential commonality of the two poles; they are two varieties of the same thing. Both the Revolution and the Establishment are nothing more than arky ideologies regarding the use of political power. Either may be capable of making some real contribution to human welfare, and each is capable of really messing up things. Neither can guarantee anything, whether good results or bad ones. Establishment types are sinners and revolutionaries are sinners—you can take that as the rule. Consequently, what horizontal alignments present as “opposite poles” are actually different points on a continuous spectrum of relative good and evil.

Thus, just where the vertical, absolutist alignment emphasizes polarization and prohibits conversation, horizontal relativism calls for the opposite. What it presents as polar distinctions are not such and dare not be treated as such. Instead, what is called for from both ends is humility, honesty, openness—a spotting what is wrong and a looking for what is right in both the one position and the other; a give-and-take that is mutually affirmative as well as mutually critical; two-way recognition and correction; a search for reconciliation through the discovery of new locations on the spectrum where the values of each can be preserved as the “poles” move closer together. Precisely because the alignment is relative, each position must be taken as only relatively right or wrong, relatively fixed, relatively important.

Kierkegaard, perhaps, has put it best: “Whatever difference there may be between two persons, even if humanly speaking it were most extreme, God has it in his power to say, ‘When I am present, certainly no one will presume to be conscious of this difference, because that would be standing and talking to each other in my presence as if I were not present’“ (Works of Love, p. 315).

Nevertheless, just because—in comparison to the absolute choice, in comparison to God and his kingdom—all relative, human choices are seen as insignificant is not to say that they are of no importance at all, that they merit no concern or attention from us. To say that each pole represents a shade of gray is not to say that, in every case, it is the same shade. It is not to say that one arky might not have a relative advantage over another, a moral advantage well worth striving for. I don’t know that Jesus ever condemns our involvement with and struggle over the relative arky choices that confront us. In fact, he gives instruction and counsel regarding many of them. However, what he does condemn is our bypassing the absolute choice in the interests of absolutizing some relative choice which we choose to make all-important. Consequently, we dare not, in principle, declare the Revolution always to be preferable to the Establishment (or vice versa). Each case is relative to its own merits.

We now can define “zealotism” as that moral zeal which gets so carried away in its holy cause that it takes its own relative righteousness for the absolute righteousness of God himself. The anti-Roman Zealots of the first century are a good example of the disease; yet we need to realize that, even there, “zealotism” was by no means confined to the Zealots. The Jewish establishment, working together with the Romans, was just as zealously certain that its arky represented the “God-pole” of the alignment. And each side put up good arguments. The establishment held the temple, the priesthood, the Scriptures, and religious learning—and stood for law and order. The revolution represented the end-time hopes of the people—and stood for righteousness, justice, and the liberation of the poor. The fact that each had a convincing God-claim would seem a rather good indicator of the relativity of both. In his anarchical response, Jesus displayed the very wisdom of God when, rather than choosing between them, he renounced the zealotism of both.

The Zealot movement did not become sinful only when it became violent. In its absolutizing of the relative (insisting that one’s readiness to resist Rome is the test of true faith), it was sinful from the beginning and would have been so even if it had somehow managed to avoid physical violence. In fact, my guess is that it is the very action of absolutizing that makes violence as much as inevitable. Once a party is convinced it represents “God” over against “Satan,” it is in position to justify whatever action proves necessary in taking out that satan.

The sin of absolutizing the relative could, I suppose, be called idolatry; but I’m not sure that quite says it. It is not so much a case of setting up a god besidesYahweh as it is our presuming to locate God, to say where he stands (namely, at the position of our arky’s good cause and against the other arky’s bad cause). We do this rather than allowing God to locate us (namely, as sinful, lost, and helpless). But whatever such sin should be called, it is bad—a form of Eden’s “titanism” in which man presumes to set the rules by which God must play, assigns him his position on the field, and even tries to coach him. Zealotism signifies something much more serious than simply an enthusiasm for God that accidentally overdoes a good thing.

Starting out bad, zealotism inevitably gets worse. We defined it as “moral zeal for a holy cause”—but that was to put the matter as charitably as possible. With some regularity zealotism comes across more strongly as “moral zeal against unholy causes.” Although the first-century Zealots claimed (undoubtedly honestly enough) that their motivation was the liberation of the poor, what they became best at was sticking it into the ribs of the rich (to the extent that they even came to be known as “the knifemen”). True to form, contemporary zealots prove much more proficient at denouncing whomever they choose to call warmongering than they are at positive peacemaking.

Now it may be thought that these two—loving the good and hating the evil—come to the same thing, that they are simply two sides of the same coin, but that just isn’t so. Jesus showed us that they are not—at the same time showing that he was not a Zealot. He loved the poor—but did it without hating the rich. He loved the poor, indeed, while showing love toward different rich people at the same time. In fact, in his book Money and Power (pp.137-73), Ellul argues well that Jesus didn’t even draw the good-poor/bad-rich distinction in the same simplistic terms we do. None of this, of course, is to deny that Jesus recognized an important although relative distinction between the poor and the rich. How did he manage it? He managed it by anarchically keeping relative alignments relative, refusing to absolutize them. It is only those absolutely certain of their own rightness who can afford to take out after those they know to be absolutely wrong.

Indeed, there is reason to believe that, at least in some cases, behind the zealous castigation of a particular sin or sinner lies the castigator’s need to butress his own holiness. He centers in on a selected sin (which is not his) in the interests of promoting his own selective righteousness. Such clearly was the case with the scribes and Pharisees whose zealous hatred of immorality had them ready to kill the woman taken in adultery. Plainly, their actual concern was not so much her sin as the promotion of their own righteousness. They were out to use her—absolutizing her relative moral defect as a way of absolutizing their own (defective) moral righteousness. Zealotism’s outlook of “us good guys versus them bad guys”—white-hatted heroes versus black-hatted villains—lends itself to such terrible acts: the black, black, blacker I can paint my selected enemy, the white, white, more heroically white it leaves me. “I thank God that I am not like other men—notably Ronald Reagan or Fidel Castro or whoever our ‘bad guy’ may be” (Luke 18:11).

As we proceed to analyze the character of Christian zealotism on the current scene, perhaps the one best example lies in the “peace movement,” that arky opposing nuclear armament. We will stick with it as our example, our case study—although with the understanding that it is only an example. Zealotism itself is a widespread disease which readers, on their own, will have no trouble spotting and diagnosing throughout our religious and political institutions.

Current church literature and teaching often give the impression that we Christians consider it more important for a person to join us is in opposing the nukes than in worshiping Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. We use a person’s stand on nuclear arms as a truer test of a person’s Christianity than his stand on the biblical proclamation as to who Christ is. This is a zealotism, placing the importance of a human arky above the true God.

Likewise, the movement shows the zealot tendency of becoming highly sensitized to the selected “sin of the day” (which is regularly someone else’s rather than our own) and as much as totally insensitive to sins that come closer home. As Jesus put it, we get agitated about the speck in the other person’s eye while completely ignoring the log in our own. So, for purposes of log/speck comparison, let’s put the sin of nuclear armament up against, say, the sin of adultery—first being reminded that the same set of ten commandments which says, “You shall not kill,” also says, “You shall not commit adultery.” I find nothing in the text of those commandments inviting us to categorize its prohibited sins into those which are really, really bad and those which aren’t really bad at all.

That paragraph sets my argument about adultery but hardly constitutes it. Much more needs to be said about the basic character of sin and how the sinfulness of any particular behaviour is to be evaluated. We cannot just go by how many individuals are hurt in what way. Much more important is the discovery of how sin affects us spiritually, and how it changes our relationship to God. “Sin” is always defined in relation to God before it is in relation to neighbour (although I do not mean to suggest that the two aspects are ever separable). Yet the modern tendency is to be completely blind to the Godward side of sin.

Regarding nuclear armament, then, its principal and essential sinfulness is certainly the wickedness of nations in wresting from God’s hands the power and authority to direct the course of history and dictate the future (or non-future) of the planet. It is the Tower of Babel all over again. By the way, this has been the sinfulness of militarism since the beginning. Nuclear capability marks a technological advance but not much of a change in the nature of the sin itself. No, the sinful determination to make history go our way has been a constant problem throughout the life of the race.

Regarding, then, in its turn, the sin of adultery, the Bible’s treatment of the subject will best tell us what we need to know. Although, as far as we are told, King David’s was a one-time affair that was quickly repented, yet we must be impressed by how seriously God took the matter—sending a prophet especially to get things straightened out and having the story written up in Scripture as a critical juncture in the history of his people. Plainly, more was involved than a bit of sexual misbehavior that incurred God’s legalistic displeasure in having one of his commandments broken.

No, with David—as probably with most of his celebrity colleagues in this sin—it seems not to have been his intention to challenge the rightness of the Seventh Commandment. In fact, he was probably all for it ... as a rule for common, run-of-the-mill sinners. They need such constraint; it helps keep them on the straight and narrow. Yet the case is entirely different with His Royal Majesty, King o’ the Realm David. It is given to kings to make the laws—definitely not to obey them along with the common people. David’s clearly was an “elitist adultery,” a matter not so much of “executive—” as of “titanic-privilege,” the privilege of being “big man.”

Thus, the sin of David was not so much “adultery” as the pretension of claiming to be “like God.” God himself well understood what was involved and so had the affair commemorated as marking both David’s personal decline and the progressive breakup of his kingdom. If the spiritual nature of nuclear armament is that of Babel, the spiritual nature of this sort of adultery is that of Eden. And who would presume to say which is a log and which a speck?

Yet the evidence is that the sin of “elitist adultery” is still very much with us and that God’s spiritual diagnosis of it is correct. A recent biography of Lyndon Johnson makes it plain that he was of the company—and quotes him something to the effect that “power is a wonderful sex stimulant” (an observation that gets to the very heart of the matter).

In a syndicated newspaper piece, columnist Joan Beck raises concerns similar to ours—this in connection with the abysmal personal morality of different members of the Kennedy family as that has been exposed in a number of recent books about them. Regarding President Kennedy, she writes:

And didn’t voters have a right to know that he cheated routinely on his wife—or that he used the Secret Service to sneak women in and out of the White House and that one of his longer dalliances was with the mistress of Mafia leader Sam Giancana? Or that when there were no Hollywood stars or starlets around, he used two blonds from the secretarial pool whom he and his friends called “Fiddle and Faddle” (while Jackie, who knew about them, dubbed them “the White House dogs”)?

Please hear me when I say that my point in speaking of these two presidents has nothing to do with any desire to attack or derogate them. My one interest is the extreme selectivity and inconsistency with which Christian zealotism applies moral standards. By what logic do we see it right to scream bloody murder about the sinfulness of nuclear armament and show virtually no concern about the sort of adultery that goes on among bigwigs in the worlds of religion, business, and entertainment—as well as politics?

It will not do to try the usual dodge of suggesting that nuclear armament is a matter having widespread public repercussions while adultery is a purely personal matter. It strikes me that Beck’s picture identifies President Kennedy as extremely sexist—a matter interpreted as anything but “one’s private business” in our day. So why is it that writers who fail to use gender inclusive terms regularly get accused of sexism, while the most prominent feminist of the country names President Kennedy as one of her favorite men? Could this be selective moralism?

Further, John F. Kennedy’s taking of Roman Catholic wedding vows (with a nuptial mass) “before God and these witnesses” was a deliberately public act of solemn covenant-making. Deliberately public, also, was his carefully nurtured, politically essential image as husband, father, and family man. So, if President Kennedy was this quick to put the satisfaction of his carnal appetites ahead of honesty and the integrity of his solemn oath-taking, what assurance have we that he would not treat his solemn oath of office the same way?

I submit that this sort of power-privileged deceit and infidelity (to God and these witnesses just as much as to his wife and family) is every bit as much a threat to the moral existence of society as nuclear armament is to its physical existence—which, I think, is why in the first place God wanted the commandment against adultery in there right along with the one against killing, and why he gave special attention to David’s case. Consequently, I was greatly disturbed when, in reviewing one of these Kennedy books, The Christian Century stated that, although the Christian public once would have been disturbed by such presidential behaviour, it can now take it in stride. Does this not reflect a most highly selective moral standard?

What is going on when, regarding President Nixon we are determined to take every step to ferret out his “sin,” damn it in no uncertain terms, broadcast it to the ends of the earth, and dog him with it to his grave? So what is going on when, at the same time, regarding President Kennedy, we treat his “sin” as something we’d just as soon not hear about and, having heard, would prefer to forget and not have broadcast any further. Nixon’s sin we play up to be as heinous as we can make it. Kennedy’s we play down as a little fault that Christians should lovingly overlook. So what is the principle of selection behind so obvious a practice of selective sin and righteousness? Let me make a try at that one.

In the first place, this selectivity must be an indication that our “moral standards” come from somewhere other than an absolute commitment to the absolute God. The hallmark of his justice is its impartiality, its refusal to show bias or play favourites. “You shall not be partial in judgment; you shall hear the small and the great alike; you shall not be afraid of the face of man, for the judgment is God’s”—as was understood as early as the writing of Deuteronomy 1:17. Our moral selectivity has to have come from somewhere other than God.

My understanding is that this selectivity indicates a zealotism born of the worldly arky contest. Could it be that what actually triggered our moral indignation against Nixon was the fact that he was a Republican “conservative” with a less than winning personality? Could it be that what calls up our moral leniency toward Kennedy is the fact that he was a Democratic “liberal” of very winsome personality? Could it be that, in our zealotism, we adapt our “moral standards” to serve as weapons of arky warfare? Could it be that we have our moral sensitivity honed to a fine point when there is opportunity for using its righteous indignation to shaft the enemy with whom we disagree and whom we just plain don’t like? Could it be that we have that moral sensitivity just as conveniently blunted as soon as there arises the possibility that its judgment might fall upon ourselves or the friends we do agree with and very much like? Could it be that selective sin and righteousness is a far cry from the real thing, namely God’s understanding of both sin and righteousness?

 

 

Apart from “biased morality,” zealotism leads to other difficulties. Apparently, along with the absolutist sense of being right comes also the license to say about the opposition anything that pops into your head—as long as it is bad. The assumption seems to be that it is always okay to speak evil of Satan—whether that satan be the U.S. Government or the National Council of Churches (Left and Right, tit for tat). But regularly, one of the first casualties of zealotism (and a most serious loss) is the biblical command to “speak the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15).

That command has two aspects, both of which are essential. “To speak the truth” surely intends a scrupulous regard for fact—both in taking pains to get the facts (all the facts) before presuming to speak and in sticking to the facts when one does speak. Plainly, this obligation is the more weighty when we set out to accuse an enemy than when we are out to compliment a friend. We need to be aware of and ready to correct for our personal bias and prejudice.

To speak that truth “in love,” then, adds a further obligation. Kierkegaard once pointed out that, although our natural propensity is to be very strict toward other people’s sins and very lenient toward our own, Scripture would have it the other way around: we should be most suspicious of our own perceived righteousness and most ready to forgive and make allowance for what we perceive as the sin of others.

However, it is in his treatment of “Love Hides the Multiplicity of Sins (1 Peter 4:8)” (in Works of Love, pp. 261ff.) that Kierkegaard becomes most pointed. One of his theme statements reads: “Love hides the multiplicity of sins, for what it cannot avoid seeing or hearing, it hides in silence, in a mitigating explanation, in forgiveness.” And it is his middle term—”a mitigating explanation”—that is particularly germane to our topic of speaking the truth in love.

In almost every case, even after the facts are in hand and have been given their true value, there is still a great deal of leeway, still room for a number of different interpretations, differing explanations of what those facts actually mean. Zealotism, out of its absolutizing need to make the black-and-white contrast as stark as possible, regularly gives the most negative interpretation to the behavior of “the enemy” and the most positive (“taking in stride”) to that of “the friend.” Love, Kierkegaard insists, always opts for the most positive, even (or especially) in the case of enemies. Of course he is not asking that we ignore or twist the facts in the interests of love. Rather, in telling the truth, we should make it as loving as the facts will allow.

As we come to specific examples, we are still sticking with the peace movement. Our point can better be made with one case study than by banging away, hit or miss, all over the place. However, let me reiterate that I am not singling out the peace movement for special criticism. The “loose speaking” of zealotism could be documented on one issue or another, with party after party, left, right, and probably middle—all across the political (and theological) spectrum.

Let me say at the outset that I believe very few if any peace zealots, of whatever persuasion, to be deliberately unloving speakers of untruth. Some just get “carried away.” Nevertheless, zealotism often fails to speak the truth (whether in love or not) and that by several different means.

Half-truth: We seek out and speak loudly the worst things about the enemy, while neglecting to as much as mention the good things that would round out and balance up his picture.

Half-truth: We single out our selected villain and really roast him, carefully ignoring the fact that, if he were compared to those around him, he might even show up as the best of the bunch.

Half-truth: As per the suggestion Kierkegaard already has made, we give the worst possible interpretation to what may even be accurate facts about our enemy.

Half-truth: We keep the probing spotlight fixed on him and are careful not to let it fall upon ourselves.

Regarding the peace issue, the enemy surely should be identified as that nationalistic pride and pretension which proposes to take over and run things its own way—in defiance of God, the public welfare, and humane concern. But at the same time, it should be recognized that this disease is and has been a part of every state or government (rightist or leftist) that has ever been. “Impositional power” is the very name of the arky game. More, this sort of pretension is a disease that can and does infect “movements,” “groups,” and individuals as well as nations. It has not even been demonstrated that zealots themselves are immune to it.

But zealots can’t be content with a targeting that might possibly splash even onto them. The villain has to be more narrowly selected. Nationalistic warmongering is now seen to be the particular sin of the technological West.

With that, absolutism is taking over, and the truth we are committed to speak is slipping away. Both historically and presently the Third World has warred and killed with all its limited technological skill—just as the West has with its almost unlimited technological skill. But that the wars of the Third World have been notably smaller than those of the West is no credit to the people’s moral restraint—any more than the grand scale of Western war is a sign of those people’s greater depravity. Both are intent on doing the best sinning possible with what they’ve got. And the more I learn about Pol Pot’s purge in Cambodia, the more I wonder whether any Western state will ever be able to play in that Third World league. To damn Western war and leave the Third World looking like lovers of peace simply is not speaking the truth.

But with zealotism, things get worse rather than better. It turns out that the black heart of the black West is the United States of America. “More than any other event in history the worldwide human experience of those August days in 1945 (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) was a recapitulation of the primeval Fall.” In the totality of human history there has been but one sin to compare with Adam’s, and our own United States of America has the honour of having committed it. We win out over the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus, the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Turkish genocide of Armenia, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, you name it. Compared to us, everything else is innocence.

Why would it not be nearer to speaking the truth in love to say some things such as these: “In World War II, every combatant that possessed atomic capability used it. That some did not possess it is of no moral credit to them. The evidence is that all would have liked to have it and would have used it if they had had it—as would the Romans (or the Zealots) if it could have been theirs in the first century. So where is the big difference in moral evil?

“Whereas Hiroshima was destroyed with a single bomb, other cities in other nations and other wars have suffered similar devastation from conventional (if not primitive) weapons—it just took a bit longer to do it. So where is the big difference in moral evil?

“Although we are not obligated to agree, we are obligated seriously to consider and thoughtfully to respond to President Truman’s rationale for using the bomb. His explanation cannot simply be waved aside as stupid.”

One characteristic of zealotism is to pooh-pooh and airily dismiss—rather than face and confute—arguments from the other side. But Truman’s stated purpose was to end the war quickly and thus save great numbers of both Japanese and American lives which very surely would have been lost if Americans would have had to fight their way into Tokyo. For that matter, if the Zealots must share the moral responsibility for what the Romans did to Jerusalem, why should not the Japanese High Command share moral responsibility for the fact that they refused to surrender even after we had given them every possible signal that this was their only alternative? They did have it in their power easily to end the war with the saving of countless lives. We could end it only through one of two alternatives (the bomb or the invasion)—each very costly. Construe the facts any way you honestly can, there hardly seem grounds for accusing President Truman of a big jump in moral evil. But to continue:

“That the Hiroshima bomb was not ‘history’s most evil event’ as the zealots make it out to be is shown clearly by its context. The bomb was not used as a first strike but as one blow in a raging war in which every combatant already was throwing everything he had. And this war the U.S. had not started but had entered only under the provocation of what was indeed a dastardly first strike. The U.S. purpose in using the bomb clearly was to achieve a surrender and a cessation of hostilities, and was in no way a genocide of the Japanese people. In defeating the Japanese, the U.S. did not practice the sort of torture and atrocity the Japanese had practiced very freely in their turn. The subsequent occupation of Japan shows for a fact that the U.S. had no imperialistic designs and no interest in the sort of domination and exploitation that was the case, say, in the Roman occupation of first-century Palestine.”

Now I am opposed to war—all war, including the U.S. involvement in World War II. But in my anti-war manual of the Bible I find not one little bit of this business of playing fast and loose with the facts in order to single out one nation’s “war demon” as the special recipient of true Christianity’s righteous rage. I find it suggesting, rather, that from Cain on, all war has been very much the same, a manifestation of the same spirit of sin, no matter who’s doing it how—even if it should be the “peace people’s” war against the U.S. Government.

I find nothing in my Bible of the white-hatted “us” being paired off against the black-hatted “them”; picking out one party as particular villain while letting off others as comparatively innocent. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out how this polarizing approach is supposed to improve our chances of finding peace.

If the peace movement be understood as a battle against the forces of evil, I guess zealot methods of battling at least fit the picture. However, if the purpose of the peace movement is to help pacify the conflicts and tensions of a storm-vexed world, I can’t figure how zealotism stands a chance of making any contribution at all. For instance, a tax-resister publishes an article arguing his position and winds up telling the reader: “I fully expect that you will be able to put me down with theological arguments, or discredit me with a self-righteous application of Scripture taken out of context to justify and rationalize your position.” What possible purpose is that line meant to serve?

I suppose there must be some satisfaction in being so sure of your position that you can brand everyone that disagrees with you as a fraud without even hearing what he has to say. But I would think the cause of peace (perhaps above all others) should be focused upon reaching out—upon dialoguing with others, becoming reconciled with others, convincing others, winning others for the peaceable kingdom through peaceable means.

There is no way wild accusation can amount to a positive contribution to the cause of peace. Personally, I doubt whether the irresponsible denouncing of bad people (and I have been denounced by some of the most righteous people around) is ever much help at all—at least it has never been of any help to me. For sure, this was never the mark of Jesus’ approach to sinners, even though his righteousness would beat that of all the world’s zealots put together.

So let us have done with the business of polarizing what ought to be reconciled, denying kinship where we should be finding commonality, shouting down what ought to be heard, putting down those who should be helped up, blackening reputations where we should be cleansing them, making enemies of those who might be made friends, displaying our righteousness at the cost of the other guy’s, absolutizing issues that should be left relative, doing violence (yes, violence) to both truth and love.

What is the cure? Where is the way out? Whether either Jesus or Ellul and the Blumhardts knew they were speaking Christian Anarchy, Jesus said it and they caught what he said: “But give to God what belongs to God.” Make him the absolute that shows up all other choices as relative. That way, and only that way, lies freedom—freedom from the false absolutizing of the arkys (whether absolutizing the state as a god or, what is just as bad, absolutizing it as a satan); freedom to treat relative choices as the human relativities they truly are; freedom in which “world power is neither justified nor condemned but is deprived of its significance”—by giving to God the absolute loyalty and obedience that belongs to God.

5. Karl Barth: A Theology of Christian Anarchy

In 1914 Karl Barth served as Reformed pastor in the Swiss village of Safenwil. With his close friend and neighboring pastor, Eduard Thurneysen, he preached the “social Gospel” (social activism through political involvement) so popular in Europe at the time.

Barth and Thurneysen looked to the men under whom they had studied theology in Germany as their guides and rode models. But on August 1, 1914, the day World War I began, their world fell apart. Karl Barth, in retrospect, says:

On that very day ninety-three German intellectuals issued a terrible manifesto, identifying themselves before all the world with the war policy.... And to my dismay, among the signatories I discovered the names of almost all my German teachers.... To me they seemed to have been hopelessly compromised by what I regarded as their failure in the face of the ideology of war.... Thus a whole world of theological training, ethics, dogmatics, and preaching, which I had hitherto held to be trustworthy, was shaken to the foundations, and with it, all the other writings of the German theologians.

For Barth the outbreak of the World War was “a double madness,” involving not only his theological teachers but also European socialism.... “All along the national war fronts we saw it swinging into line . . . marking the failure of German Social Democracy (the German peace movement) in the face of the ideology of war.”

Note well what it is specifically with which Barth is so completely disillusioned: “arky faith,” namely, the confidence that the organized human piety of a nation’s leading Christians (the progressives, even) could bring society to moral health—or at least preserve it from moral death. And this faith of his (thank God) Barth was never able to recover.

Another aspect of this disillusionment must be mentioned. Recall that both Barth and Thurneysen were pastors. Once the poverty of their Protestant faith had been exposed, they were desperate to find a gospel that could be preached as help and good news to their people. Throughout his career, Barth’s one interest in theology had nothing to do with his own intellectual satisfaction; he simply wanted to find the message that could truly be preached as good news.

Christoph Blumhardt, a friend of the Thurneysen family, had occasionally visited in that home. A sister of Barth’s mother—his beloved Aunt Bethi—was a Blumhardt follower who regularly spent time at the Christian community in Bad Boll. Both Thurneysen and Barth had visited Bad Boll from time to time during their school days. But when, in April 1915, Barth spent five days there—that was different: it was a deliberate seeking of help. He wrote:

Above all, it has become increasingly clear to me that what we need is something beyond all morality and politics and ethics [i.e., beyond arky faith]. These are constantly forced into compromises with “reality” and therefore have no saving power in themselves. This is true even of the so-called Christian morality and so-called socialist politics.... In the midst of this hopeless confusion, it was the message of the two Blurnhardts with its orientation on Christian hope which above all began to make sense to me.

The unique feature, indeed the prophetic feature (and I use the word deliberately), in Blumhardt’s message and mission was in the way in which the hurrying and the waiting, the worldly and the divine, the present and the future, met, were united, kept supplementing one another, seeking and finding one another.

Soon after his return to Switzerland, Barth began to read the older Blumhardt’s writings. They moved him deeply and he began to speak of them to others. Putting the main ideas of the Blumhardt’s into his own words he wrote about:

a.     The Poverty of Human Arky. “Is it not that the whole of human independence and self-assurance are weighed in the balance and found wanting? ... This is the question that fell on me like a ton of bricks in 1915. We must begin all over again with a new inner understanding of what really matters in life. Only this can deliver us from the chaos that comes from the failure of all conservative or revolutionary proposals and counter-proposals. The problem of ‘war or peace?’—about which there is so much talk and writing—has to give way to the radical and deadly serious question of faith: ‘Shall we go on with God or—as we have been doing—without him?’ Above all, it will be a matter of our recognizing God once more as God.... This is a task alongside which all cultural, social, and patriotic duties are child’s play.

b.     The Wholly-Otherness of God. “It was Thurneysen who whispered the key phrase to me, half aloud, while we were alone together: What we need for preaching, instruction, and pastoral care is a ‘wholly other’ theological foundation.” This theme, for Karl Barth, became both crucial and controversial. It is the other side of the coin to “the poverty of human arky.” A Good wholly other than our human idea of “good.” A Justice wholly other than our human idea “justice.” A Power wholly other than the “power” of our human exercise. A Glory wholly other than our human vision of “glory.” An Arky of God wholly other than even the best and most Christian of human arkys.

c.     “It seems we take everything—above all everything that has to do with the state—a hundred times more seriously than God. Yet the kingdom of God is the kingdom of God. We cannot see a great enough difference God’s reality and human reality. The pattern of our moral development is a failure.... The new Jerusalem has not the least to do with the new Switzerland and the revolutionary state of the future; it comes to earth in God’s great freedom, when the time has arrived.”

d.     A New Look at the Bible. This one is as critical an aspect of Christian Anarchy as any—the Bible being its one source and authority. Barth wrote: “We had to learn our theological ABC all over again, beginning by reading and interpreting the writing of the Old and New Testaments more thoughtfully than before.... I sat under an apple tree and began to apply myself to Romans with all the resources that were available to me at the time.”

e.     In 1917, Barth delivered a lecture which was the first public account of his new biblical studies. He called it The Strange New World within the Bible: “In the Bible we find something quite unexpected: not history, not morality, not religion, but virtually a ‘new world.’ We do not find the right human thoughts about God but the right divine thoughts about men.” This is more than just a new look at the Bible; it is looking at the Bible as the word of God in a new (a more honest and open) way.

f.      The Gospel’s Focus on the Futurel. “I began to be increasingly concerned with the idea of the kingdom of God in the biblical, real, this-worldly sense of the term.” For Barth, the question of giving God a place of central importance became more and more fundamental. And since he had met Blumhardt, it was very closely connected with the question of what Christians hope for.

g.      Religious Socialism. Barth’s relationship to Religious Socialism came to a head when, in 1919, at Tambach, Germany, he addressed a conference of about a hundred religious-socialist leaders from Germany and Switzerland, including Eberhard Arnold who founded the Bruderhof community at Sannerz, a year later. In his Tambach address, Barth made “a clear and fundamental distinction between Christ or the kingdom of God on the one hand and human actions, whether conservative or revolutionary, on the other. The kingdom of God does not first begin with our movements of protest. It is the revolution which is before all revolutions, as it is before the whole prevailing order of things. In contrast to both conservatives and revolutionaries it is radically new, in such a way that says ‘no’ to both of them. . . . From God’s standpoint, all human organisations and powers are more of a hindrance than a help, since they continue to delude people about the need for the coming of his kingdom. Our ‘movements’ stand directly in the way of God’s movement; our ‘causes’ hinder his cause; the richness of our ‘life’ hinders the tranquil growth of the divine life in the world.... The collapse of our cause must demonstrate once that God’s cause is exclusively his own. That is where we stand today.”

h.     Barth’s Discovery of Anarchist Kierkegaard. This input came at just the right time to give Barth a powerful confirmation of his own theological development. “Kierkegaard only entered my thinking seriously and more extensively, in 1919, at the critical turning-point between the first and second edition of my book on Romans.... What we (Barth and Thurneysen) found particularly attractive, delightful, and instructive was his relentless but accurate criticism, that just went on snipping and snipping. We saw him using it to attack all speculation about the difference between man’s way and God’s way of doing things.

It was in 1920 that Barth decided that he needed to entirely rewrite his book on Romans for its second edition of 1921. “Only now did my opposition to the German theologians become quite clear and open.” In his revised book on Romams he wrote: “For this theology, to think of God meant to think in a scarcely veiled fashion about man—more exactly about the religious, the Christian religious man. To speak of God meant to speak in an exalted tone, but once and again and more than ever about this man—his revelations and wonders, his faith and his works. There is no question about it: here man was made great at the cost of God.”

In his revised book on Romans, Barth gives us what must now be considered “a classic statement of Christian Anarchy.”

Clearly, what Barth sees as being his first order of business is the dissolving of everything we humans have built up so there will be room for that which is of God. There can be no possibility of “bridging” between one and the other:

 

THE ARKY OF GOD		ALL HUMAN ARKY
CHRISTIAN ANARCHY		POLITICAL ANARCHISM
GOD’S SOCIALISM		POLITICAL SOCIALISM
GOD’S REVOLUTION		HUMAN REVOLUTIONS

 

Along with all Christian anarchists since Paul himself, Barth made it clear that the apostle, writing what he did in Romans 13, has not the slightest desire to legitimate any human arky as being “of God” (perhaps the Roman arky least of all). Yet there was certainly no reason for Paul to hammer that point. After all, his readers were Christians living in Rome within recent memory of the Emperor Claudius’s dreadful persecution. Who among them would feel any temptation to hallow Rome, of all arkys?

No, Barth agrees with what we said earlier, that Paul (as also the case with Jesus and the tribute money) immediately is concerned to apply the anarchistic warning much more against Leftist revolution than against Rightist collaboration. Paul certainly has no interest in legitimizing Rome; but his particular concern is that his Christian readers not legitimate revolution against Rome, either.

However, when it comes to the question as to why God wants a Roman Empire in place, why he wants it left there rather than being knocked out and replaced by a truly godly arky of the Christian revolutionaries, Barth offers a new interpretation. Our earlier suggestion was simply that God was “putting up with” the Roman empire out of his respect for human freedom—the freedom of allowing the world to be as sinful as it chooses to be. If God grants the Roman Empire the freedom to be whatever it has in mind for itself, who are we to try to deny it that freedom?

But Barth comes at the question from an entirely different (and most intriguing) direction. He proposes that, in God’s eyes, the Roman Empire of Paul’s day—and thus any state, or in our words, any human arky—stands as a “sign” (a negative sign or a contrast) of God’s own Arky (the kingdom of God).

Barth’s understanding is that God wants all those arkys in place to keep his people reminded that anything we have now is not yet the kingdom, that even the best of human arkys is no acceptable substitute for God’s Arky. And come to think of it, the Roman Empire did serve God’s purpose very well in that regard. The book of Revelation makes it clear that the early Christians owed it solely to the Roman Empire that they kept praying, “Come, Lord Jesus.” The very presence of the empire added a certain fervency to that prayer. Thanks to the empire, among them, the kingdom of God became what might be called “a felt need.”

It was no accident that the church’s taking that arky to its bosom as being the HOLY Roman Empire coincided with its ceasing to pray for the coming of the Lord Jesus. Once we get in with an arky that treats us well and serves our own personal interests, we tend to lose all hunger for the Arky of God. We think a Holy Empire that befriends rather than persecutes the church is “good enough,” “as much as can be hoped for”—no matter what it may be doing on other counts.

In this, the logic of Barth’s thought might say that the worst arky (from our standpoint) is the best (for God’s purposes). Yet this cannot be taken to mean that Christians ought to be out encouraging bad arkys for the sake of their spiritual benefit. The natural supply of bad arkys certainly is sufficient for our every need. And if we had our eyes open, we would see that even our best arkys are bad enough to leave the Arky of God something to be fervently desired and hoped for.

On the basis of what Paul wrote in Romans 13, Barth believes our relationship to the arkys should take the form of what we “not do” concerning them rather than what we “do” do. For Paul, “being subject” is the Christian “not-doing.” It is the not doing of any arky-style response, the not doing of rebellion and self-assertion. It is Paul’s own “not being conformed to the world” and “not paying evil for evil.” It is Jesus’ “not resisting one who is evil.”

Paul, of course, is one who knew best that “being subject to the authorities” in no way threatens the principle that we must obey God rather than man. He had been in trouble with the law many times for not stopping preaching when the authorities had ordered him to. Yet, even when such obeying of God necessitates the disobeying of an arky, this is no violation of the principle of “being subject.” It does not amount to a “doing” of revolt and contest. It probably shouldn’t even be called “civil disobedience”—that term now used to describe disobedience for the sake of disobedience, as a political means of attacking the bad arky, challenging, protesting, provoking, and exposing its evil. No, in cases like Paul’s refusal to stop preaching, the action is still a “not-doing” of revolution. The intent is entirely that of obeying God—it being entirely incidental that, unavoidably, the arky had to be disobeyed in the process. Indeed, the disobeyer can even remain entirely subject to the authorities by expressing regret that his obedience to God left him no recourse but to disobey the arky.

Barth’s distinction between “doing” and “not-doing” is admittedly a fine one—although not for that reason less true or less helpful in getting us to the heart of Romans 13. At which job we are now ready to let Barth speak for himself:

Christianity does not set its mind on high things (Romans 12:16). It is uneasy when it hears men speaking loudly and with confidence about “creative evolution”; when it marks their plans for perfecting the development of pure and applied science, of art, of morals, and of religion, of physical and spiritual health, of welfare and well-being. Christianity is unhappy when men boast of the glories of marriage and family life, of Church and State, and Society. Christianity does not busy itself to support and underpin those many “ideals” by which men are deeply moved—individualism, collectivism, nationalism, internationalism, humanitarianism, eccelesiasticism.... In all these growing towers Christianity beholds at least a parable of death.... It finds itself unable to place serious confidence in the permanence of any of these “important” things, or in the value of any of these “values.” Christianity perceives men moving, it is true, but moving to deprivation. (Romans, pp. 462-63)

In reading this you may well think Barth indiscriminately mixes good arkys and bad arkys as though they were all the same. But that is true anarchy—although it is not true that all arkys are all the same, to place serious confidence in any of them is. The root difficulty here is what we earlier identified as “zealotism,” the unquestioned confidence that, in our understanding of right and wrong, we are as much as infallible. Concerning this, Barth wrote:

Man is only a dilettante, a blunderer; in his attempt to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, acting as though he really has the capacity to do it.... Neither in his own cause nor in that of others can he be a wise and righteous judge.

In Genesis 3, the desire of man for a knowledge of good and evil is represented as an evil desire, indeed the one evil desire which is so characteristic and fatal for the whole race.

Am I then to take into my own hands the preservation of what is right? ... Our determination to introduce the higher righteousness is precisely that which renders it altogether lost: For the wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men (Rom. 1:18). The wrath of God is revealed against human ungodliness in doing evil and in doing good; it is revealed against the enemy and against me, if I become the enemy of my enemy. This is the criticism of militarism, but it is, in passing, a criticism of pacifism also. Who among us does in fact leave room, not for the wrath of men, but for the wrath of God? Who among us reckons seriously with the fact that human action will, not only here but everywhere, be driven off the field by the pre-eminent action of God? (Romans, p.473)

That to which Barth is objecting here is that which is most characteristic of arky faith. Has he not here spotted the most fundamental (and most impositional) power of arkydom, namely, the power of knowing oneself to be an elect representative of “the right,” asserting my strength as that of ten, because I know my heart is pure? And what virtue is so utterly lacking in the arkys as “humility”?

As Barth moves into his central argument—that which says, in effect, that Christian Anarchy equally rejects both legitimism of the arkys and revolution against them, he claims to be following Paul in very unequally giving his attention to revolution. That takes some explaining which gets him to the very heart of his anarchical concern. We begin with some crucial statements from outside his Romans book:

The little revolutions and attacks by which the powers of history seem to be more shaken than they really are, can never succeed even in limiting, let alone destroying, their power. It is the kingdom, the revolution of God, which breaks, which has already broken them. Jesus is their conqueror.

 

The victory of Jesus Christ, and thus what can be called the victory of light over darkness, can never be inferred from any victories of humanity—never at any rate with real certainty.

Writing in 1920, Barth was in the atmosphere of the Bolshevik “socialist” revolution getting its regime into place—about the same time Walter Rauschenbusch was calling it the world’s best hope for peace and brotherhood and Malcolm Muggeridge’s friends were visiting Russia and being entranced. Barth recognised that in a number of important ways the Bolsheviks were “so much nearer the truth” than the capitalist society and government they replaced. With their talk about freedom, justice, equality—about helping the poor and oppressed—they even sounded very much like Jesus. But he also knew it was precisely in that similarity that the danger lies—the danger of our taking a great sounding movement for the greatness of Jesus himself.

Barth himself was a “socialist” of sorts. But he rejected not only Religious Socialism; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; and in his later years the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazism). Of course, he was aware of the moral distinctions between these different forms of socialism, but his repudiation of each is not based upon that assessment of relative morality. Fundamentally, each is equally out of order for being a human arky claiming messianic status for itself.

So Barth’s rejection of Soviet socialism was not that of another revolutionary out to brand that arky as demonic in the effort to get his own preferred holy arky (say, capitalism) into its place. No, Barth is the Christian anarchist who is not about to legitimize Soviet socialism but who is not about to legitimize any other arky’s fighting against it or trying to replace it, either. “Give to God what belongs to God.”

On the uselessness of revolution, Barth wrote:

From the perception of the evil that lies in the very existence of existing government, Revolution is born. The revolutionary seeks to be rid of the evil by bestirring himself to battle with it and to overthrow it. He determines to remove the existing ordinances, in order that he may erect in their place the new right.... The revolutionary must, however, own that in adopting his plan he allows himself to be overcome of evil (Rom. 12:21). He forgets that he is not the One, that he is not the creator of the freedom which he so earnestly desires, that, for all the strange brightness of his eyes, he is not the Christ.... What man has the right to propound and represent the “New,” whether it be a new age, or a new world, or a new ... spirit? ... Far more than the conservative, the revolutionary is overcome of evil, because with his “No” he stands so strangely near to God. This is the tragedy of revolution. Evil is not the true answer to evil. (Romans, p.480)

Overcome evil with good (Rom. 12:21). What can this mean but the end of the triumph of men, whether their triumph is celebrated in the existing order or by revolution? And how can this be represented, if it be not by some strange “not-doing” precisely where men feel themselves most powerfully called to action?... What more radical action can one perform than the action of turning back to the original root of “not-doing”—and NOT be angry, NOT engage in assault, NOT demolish? This turning back is the ethical factor in the command, Overcome evil with good. There is here no word of approval of the existing order; but there is endless disapproval of every enemy of it. It is God who wishes to be recognized as He that overcometh the unrighteousness of the existing order. (Romans, p.481)

What, then, is the Christian to do about the arkys? Barth answers that there can be no more devastating undermining of the existing “powers” than to simply recognize them for what they are—full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. State, Church, Society, Movement, whatever power there may be, is kept alive by the excitement of those that have been drawn either to fight for or against them. But look at them for what they really are, deprive them of their imaginary importance, stop fighting (either for or against them) and they must shrivel up and die.

This is another example of “not-doing.” We are not to credit the arkys for what they present themselves as being.

Regarding the Christian who, in obedience to God, is “being subject to the existing ruling powers,” Barth says:

All unsuspecting, rulers rejoice over a citizen so remarkably well-behaved; but they are in fact rejoicing over one whose behavior signifies nothing other than the judgment of God against those rulers themselves—one who has so much to say that, there being no point in doing so, he no longer complains about them. And, in spite of the irony of his position, the Christian really does make a “good citizen.” Having freed himself of all idolatry, he does not need to engage himself in endless protestations against idols. Nor is he continually busying himself with pointing out the inadequacy of government because he no longer depends on earthly human government for his wellbeing.

The Christian doesn’t have to fret and fight regarding every evil of the world, because he knows that all will be made right in God’s good time and in God’s good way.

Calm reflection has thus been substituted for the uproar of revolution—calm, because final assertions and final complaints have been ruled out, because a prudent reckoning with reality has outrun the high talk about “warfare between good and evil,” and because an honest concern for others and a clear knowledge of the world brings the Christian to know that the strange chess-board on which men dare to experiment with men and against them—in State, Church, and Society—cannot be the scene of the conflict between the kingdom of God and Anti-Christ. (Romans, p. 489)

On this board we make no move that is not met by some dangerous counter-move; no step that does not in some way have back at us; no possibility that does not contain its own impossibility. Whether we support or oppose the existing order, we stand on the same level with it, and are subjected to one condemnation. Occupying some position, positive or negative, on the plane of the existing order, we are bound to have to pay for the fact that all positions are relative.... Whether we attempt to build up some positive human thing or to demolish what others have erected, all our endeavors to justify ourselves are in one way or another shattered in pieces. We must now assert that all these endeavors of ours not merely cannot be successful, but ought not be so. . . .

In contrast to the meaningless political order Barth saw in the world, he saw the Church of Jesus as the sign of the Kingdom of God:

In the form in which she exists among them the church can and must be to the world of men around her a reminder of the justice of the kingdom of God already established on earth in Jesus Christ, and a promise of its future manifestation. Whether they realize it or not, she can and should show them that there already exists on earth an order based on that great transformation of the human situation and directed toward its manifestation. To those outside she can and should not only say, but demonstrate by deed, ... that things can be different, not merely in heaven but on earth, not just some day but even now.

Naturally, we ask ourselves on reading this passage, exactly what “church” Barth had in mind. All through his writings he lumps in “church”—along with “State,” “Society,” and other such arkys—often enough to make it plain that the church he here sees pointing to the kingdom cannot be the arky church, that church which sees itself primarily as a sociopolitical entity and considers its greatest contribution to be its holy power-bloc influence in the world of arkydom. No, what Barth has in mind must be the anarchical church, what we have called the ekklesia—the community of gathered saints who strive in themselves to live out the arky of God but who have no interest in trying to impose that or any other order on the world about them.

It did not take long, after Barth visited the Blumhardts in Bad Boll for him to begin opposing his Reformed church’s arkydom on many fronts: denying the validity of “episcopal or synodical authority”; of infant baptism; of anything the church calls “sacrament”; of formal liturgy; of houses of worship which incorporate “pictorial and symbolic representations” or pipe organs and the like. If any church is “a sign of the kingdom,” Barth clearly indicated it would not be through any features of this sort.

There is, then, one other specification I think Barth would have wanted to make: As he says, churches (better: ekklesia-communities) can be signs, witnesses, and presentiments of God’s coming kingdom. Yet that depends entirely on God’s gracious choice and empowerment of the community rather than the community’s desire to qualify itself for the role. So, as soon any group presumes to claim and to name itself as a sign of the kingdom—as soon as it begins to foist its ideas of holiness on the world—it is on the way to Holy Roman Empires, the Crusades, and all manner of clearly negative signs. No, the last thing a true kingdom-sign community will do is to recognize itself, nominate itself, or promote itself under that identity. “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see ourselves as, or program ourselves to be, a sign of any kingdom?’” “Signs of the kingdom” give the glory to God rather than claiming it for themselves.

In 1921 Karl Barth answered a call to teach in the German university of Göttingen. To do this he needed to take on German citizenship and before long he found nearly everything he had written or spoken about God’s “otherness” and kingdom coming to the test.

Hitler’s take-over of January 30, 1933, caught Barth in bed with the flu; but he knew immediately “where I stood and what I could not do. In the last resort, this was simply because I saw my dear German people beginning to worship a false god.” Barth realized that the quick and easy capitulation of the German people—including many even of his fellow professors and students—was owing to the fact that the church had for so long been buying into whatever cultural or political arky made messianic noises that it saw this as just one more instance of the same. “It transpired,” Barth wrote, “that over the centuries the Protestant church had become involved in so many ungodly programs to such a degree that it simply could not repudiate, promptly and confidently, the crude assumption that the church, its message, and its life could be assimilated into the National Socialist State.”

But what, then, was Barth (or any Christian) to do in the face of such monstrous evil?

Barth’s own “resistance” to the State was not at all an “attack” upon it but simply the refusal to become part of it or to call it good (legitimize it). Barth was not about to let himself be pushed around. He was adamant against doing anything that could possibly be interpreted as support for German Nationalism (the Nazi party). Yet, the very figure of courtesy and propriety, he was just as careful not to be guilty of defiance, rage, condemnation, or rebellion against the established arky. His stance can be typified as nothing other than “anarchical.”

Barth’s first eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the Nazi regime came with the directive that all university classes were to open with the Hitler salute. Barth’s never did. As he explained to the administration, he had understood it as being a “recommendation” rather than an “order.” Besides, it was his custom to open class with a hymn and prayer—and the Hitler salute didn’t seem to quite fit. The administration decided not to make an issue of the matter; and Barth carried the day on that one.

On the next go-around, Barth was not so fortunate. The university prescribed an “oath of loyalty to the Führer.” And was our professor so defiant as to refuse? No, he promised to be loyal to the Führer in every way he could while upholding his responsibilities as an Evangelical Christian.” The Führer however did not find this loyalty quite enough. Immediately suspended from teaching, Barth moved (he would not have said “fled”) back to Switzerland by 1935.

Neither with the salute nor with the loyalty issue can Barth be said to have practiced “civil disobedience.” He did not stage his disobedience as a calculated political power-play. He made no effort to organize his own ideological bloc to contest that of the evil regime. He did not play up to the media as a form of public demonstration, protest, or witness. He exhibited neither rage toward nor condemnation of his adversary. He refused to treat the State as “enemy.” He was intent only to give to God what belongs to God. And in doing that, he was careful to tread the fine, anarchical line between legitimizing the establishment the one hand and legitimizing revolution against it on the other.

Even though his thoughts and reactions wavered somewhat at the beginning of the war (in answer to what to do with Germany) Karl Barth maintained his suspicion of any human arky fixing another. Speaking to church leaders gathered at Amsterdam after the war he said:

There is a serious danger that Christianity may come to grief not only in its human descriptions and assessments of earthly needs, but also in its human plans and measures for fighting those needs and overcoming them.... As Christian men and as church people we are in constant danger of thinking we ought to achieve what God alone can accomplish and what he will accomplish completely by himself.... We shall not be the ones who change this wicked world into a good one. God has not abdicated his lordship over us.... All that is required of us is that, in the midst of the political and social disorder of the world, we should be his witnesses.”

After World War II, when serious-minded people tried to get Barth to issue “a call to oppose communism and make a Christian confession”—as he had done against the Nazis, he wrote:

The church of Christ never passes judgment on principle, but by individual cases, making a new evaluation of each new event.... I am against all fear of communism. A nation which has a good conscience, whose social and democratic life is in order, need have no fear of it. Much less the church, which is sure of the gospel of Jesus Christ. . . .

The formation of an Eastern bloc and Western bloc is based on a conflict of power and ideology and the church has no occasion to take sides in it, either with the East and its “totalitarian abominations” or with the West, as long as it gives the East grounds for just criticism. But today “the way of the community of Jesus Christ in the present” has to be “another, third way of its own,” in great freedom.

Christian Anarchy won’t make you friends anywhere. By 1950, Karl Barth, who had refused to sign an international petition against nuclear weapons, found himself under investigation of American secret service agents. Reflecting on this he wrote:

Not that I have any inclination toward Eastern communism, in view of the face it has presented to the world. I decidedly prefer not to live within its sphere and do not wish anyone else to be forced to do so. But I do not see that either politics or Christianity require or even permit the conclusion which the West has drawn with increasing sharpness.... I believe anti-communism as a matter of principle to be an even greater evil than communism itself.... The Christian churches should have considered it their task to influence both public opinion and the leaders who are politically responsible by a superior witness, to the peace and hope of the kingdom of God.”

“Anti-” means against. God is not against, but for men. The communists are men, too. God is also for the communists. So a Christian cannot be against the communists but only for them. To be for the communists does not mean to be for communism. I am not for communism. But one can only say what has to be said against communism if one is for the communists.

On a Swiss radio broadcast, during this time, came the question: “What should we do?—as small, helpless people who seem to have no influence on the present confrontation between the powers.” Barth’s answer: “WE SHOULDN’T WORRY SO MUCH”—a counsel of “not-doing,” which Jesus worded, “Be not anxious; you can’t add an iota to God’s work in any case.” Then, in further explanation of what he had in mind, Barth wrote:

Jesus was not in any sense a reformer championing new orders against the old ones, contesting the latter in order to replace the former. He did not range Himself and His disciples with any of the existing parties.... Nor did he set up against them an opposing party. He did not represent or defend or champion any programme—whether political, economic, moral, or religious, whether conservative or progressive. He was equally suspected and disliked by the representatives of all such programmes, although He did not particularly attack any of them. Why His existence was so unsettling on every side was that He set all programmes and principles in question. And he did this simply because He enjoyed and displayed, in relation to all the orders positively or negatively contested around Him, a remarkable freedom which again we can only describe as royal.

On the other hand, He had no need to break any of these orders, to try to overthrow them altogether, to work for their replacement or amendment. He could live in these orders (those of the temple cult and the Roman civil regime) because he did not oppose other “systems” to these. He did not make common cause with the Essene reforming movement. He simply revealed the limit and frontier of all these things—the freedom of the kingdom of God.

The kingdom, the Arky of God, comes into Barth’s picture just where Christian Anarchy says it should.

Karl Barth died in his sleep during the night of December 9, 1968. He had spent the day working on a lecture and was still at work in the evening when he was interrupted by two telephone calls, about nine o’clock. One was from his nephew Ulrich Barth to whom he quoted a verse from a hymn that spoke comfortingly about the Christian hope. The other person who wanted to speak to him so late at night was his friend Eduard Thurneysen, who had remained faithful to him over sixty years. They talked about the gloomy world situation. Then Barth said, “But keep your chin up! Never mind!” and closed the conversation with the old Blurnhardt motto: “He will reign!”

And so to bed and to sleep—from which, on “that day,” he (along with Thurneysen, the Blumhardts, and all the rest of us) shall awake to proclaim: “He reigns, indeed!”

6. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Even though he did not always leave a consistent record behind him, or a clear witness, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, shot for resisting Nazi rule in Germany, understood to a certain degree what Christian anarchy means. He knew, at least, that true freedom, true liberation, is not served by fighting the arkys, by rebelling against or trying to revolutionize them. Before his death in a Bavarian concentration camp he wrote:

It is not as though St. Paul were trying to condone or gloss over a black spot in the social order. He does not mean the class-structure of secular society is so good and godly an institution that it would be wrong to upset it by revolution. The truth of the matter is that the whole world has already been turned upside down by the work of Jesus Christ, which has wrought a liberation for freeman and slave alike. A revolution would only obscure that divine New Order which Jesus Christ has established. It would also hinder and delay the disruption of the existing world order in the coming of the kingdom of God.... To renounce rebellion and revolution is the most appropriate way of expressing our conviction that the Christian hope is not set on this world, but on Christ and his kingdom. And so—let the slave remain a slave! It is not reform the world needs, for it is already ripe for destruction.... Therefore let not the slave suffer [even] in silent rebellion, but as a member of the Church and the Body of Christ. He will thereby hasten the end of the world. (pp. 291-92)

Bonhoeffer is powerful in showing that Christian Anarchy is the result of the hope given to us in Jesus’ Gospel. Just as far as he is from blessing rebellion and revolution, so far is he from legitimizing the established arkys—and that combination is precisely what we mean by Christian Anarchy. When he says that revolution would “obscure the divine New Order,” I take him to mean that revolution’s loud claim, condemnation, threat, challenge, and rage simply do not fit into the kingdom of God. It represents too contrary a spirit. For Christians simply to answer worldly politics with more politics, adding worldliness to worldliness—this can but hinder God’s program of having worldliness wither away as it is overcome by good.

“‘Become not the bondservants of men,’” Bonhoeffer wrote. “This enslavement can happen in two different ways. First, it may happen by a revolution and the overthrow of the established order, and secondly by investing the established order with a halo of spirituality.” Either joining the arkys or fighting them spells enslavement to them; the only freedom is to ignore them and go with the Arky of God.

“The world exercises dominion by force and Christ and Christians conquer by service,” Bonhoeffer wrote. Regarding Romans 13, then, he goes on to say:

Paul’s concern is that Christians should persevere in repentance and obedience wherever they may be and whatever conflict should threaten them. He is not concerned to excuse or to condemn any secular power. No State is entitled to read into St. Paul’s words a justification of its own existence.... St. Paul certainty does not speak to the Christians in this way because the governments of this world are so good, but because the Church must obey the will of God, whether the State be bad or good.

Bonhoeffer makes it clear that the question about how well the state may or may not be behaving at the moment has nothing to do with Paul’s counsel regarding it:

The whole of Paul’s doctrine of the State in Romans 13 is controlled by the introductory admonition: “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21). It is immaterial whether the power be good or bad, what matters is that the Christian should overcome evil by good. The question of the payment of taxes to the Emperor was a point of temptation with the Jews. They pinned their hopes on the destruction of the Roman Empire, which would enable them to set up an independent dominion of their own. But for Jesus and his followers there was no need to be agitated over this question. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Matt. 22:21), says Jesus. “For this cause pay ye tribute also” (Rom. 13:6), says St. Paul at the end of his exposition. So, far from contradicting the precept of our Lord, Paul’s command is identical in meaning—Christians are to give Caesar what belongs to him in any case.... To oppose or resist at this point would be to show a fatal inability to distinguish between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world.

Up to this point, we have examined the thought and explanations of Jacques Ellul, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. These people show remarkable agreement on a quite original line of interpretation. But it may have been that ancient anarchist Søren Kierkegaard who founded this school of thought. His word comes in Training in Christianity (Princeton University Press, 1944), pp. 169-70:

What could Jesus do with kingly power who was the most indifferent of all men with respect to everything worldly? The small nation to which he belonged was under foreign domination, and naturally all were intent on the thought of shaking off the hated yoke. Hence they would acclaim him king. But, lo, when they show him a coin and would constrain him against his will to take sides with one party or the other—what then?

Nothing in the world, no patriotic passion for either one side or the other can shake his indifference! He asks, “Whose image is this that is stamped upon the coin?” They answer, “The Emperor’s.” Then he says, “Give to the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor, and to God what is God’s.” Infinite indifference! Whether the Emperor be called Herod or Shalmanezer, whether he be Roman or Japanese, is to him the most insignificant of all things. But, on the other hand—the infinite yawning difference which he puts between God and the Emperor: “Give unto God what is God’s!”

Those with worldly wisdom would make it a question of religion, of duty to God, whether or not it was lawful to pay tribute to the Emperor. Worldliness is so eager to embellish itself as godliness, and in this case God and the Emperor are blended together in the question, as if these two had obviously and directly something to do with each other. As if perhaps they were rivals one of the other, or as if God were some kind of an emperor too. The question takes God in vain and secularizes him. But Christ draws the distinction, the infinite distinction. And he does this by treating the question about paying tribute to the Emperor as the most indifferent thing in the world, regarding it as something which one should do without wasting a word or an instant in talking about it—so as to get more time for giving to God what is God’s.

Thus Kierkegaard, long before Bonhoeffer,  “made cowards of us all.” He not only said it first; he said it best.

7. Arky and Anarchy: How it Works

Our natural tendency is to think that “God has no hands but our hands to do his work today.” Accordingly, we believe that, if God’s will is to be done on earth, it will have to be done in the way we go about seeing that our own wills get done there. So we proceed to read and use our Bibles as manuals of arky triumph through moral progress—never once noticing that Scripture isn’t with us in any of these assumptions. It understands history in completely different terms. I hope the following study comes as something of a shock to you—as it did to me.

The very term “arky faith”—we have seen—as much as says that progressive triumph in the arky struggle is its means of moral accomplishment. The term “Christian Anarchy” is different in that the term itself gives no hint as to what its positive way and method will be. The term is accurate negatively, however, in telling us that Christian anarchy will make no use of the arkys, will not so much as recognize their presence, will accordingly be “unarkycal.”

Also, here as previously, Christian Anarchy is going to go entirely with the Arky of God and with the Jesus Christ who—Colossians 1:18 tells us—is THE ARKY. And of course, it is precisely because Jesus is The Arky that Christians must be anarchistic toward whatever other powers claim arky status.

The anarchical principle now to be expounded as the theme of Scripture we will identify as death and resurrection, and for its theme statement we will turn to 1 Corinthians 15:22: “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”

When Paul speaks of our being “in Adam,” he clearly intends “Adam” to be symbolic of the universal human tendency to want to dispense with God and his authority and determine the course of life and history for ourselves. We do this by depending solely upon our own apple-wisdom from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, convinced that that makes us morally competent (no question but that we know what is good and what is evil) and qualifies us to engineer the triumph of the good.

Yet the apostle states flatly that the Adamic principle never can be expected to produce growth, maturity, and moral development but only deterioration and death. Our “being made alive,” then, Paul tells us, can come about only through that gracious intervention of God which, because of our being “in Christ,” resurrects us into “newness of life” right along with Christ himself.

Thus, the graph of “death and resurrection” will be entirely different from the continuous and gradual ascent of arky triumph. Now the line on the chart will mark a deterioration and fall to the low point of Good Friday. It was there humanity died morally when our vaunted apple-knowledge had us so confused as to wind up murdering the very Arky (the beginning, the primal source) of All Good, the Incarnation of God’s Grace, the One who was to have been our “Peace.” It was in that death, Paul tells us, that we ourselves died, were co-crucified with Christ. Clearly, his thought is that the cross marks the spot where, in Adam, all died. From that point, it is not through any sort of continuity or gradualism but as the completely radical disjuncture of an Easter reversal that God intervenes to suddenly jump the line up to the ultimate level of all being made alive.

Keep this graph before your eyes, for it is now our purpose to show that this death-and-resurrection pattern does by no means either begin or end simply with Jesus’ Good-Friday-to-Easter experience. That, of course, is the high point of the development. But the pattern itself dominates the Bible from beginning to end. In a quick run-through, we will now spot seventeen different variations on the theme—with the hope that the whole message of Scripture will consequently take on this anarchic coloring.

1.     We encounter our first instance in the third chapter of Genesis. Adam decides he can handle life on his own and wants the fruit of the tree he thinks will enable him to do it. God tells him that if he eats the fruit he will die. Adam eats it and promptly dies (it didn’t take long for that line to hit bottom). His death in relation to God is signified by his effort to hide from God. His death in relation to himself is signified by his shame over his own nakedness. His death in relation to others is signified by the fact that the beloved wife, whom (just verses earlier) he had addressed as “bone of my bones,” is now referred to as “that blankety-blank you stuck me with, she did it.” His death in relation to his world is signified by his being kicked out of Eden. End of story. Well, yes, it would be—except for the fact that there is a little resurrection text tucked in there, verse 21: “And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins and clothed them.” He picked up the dead and provided them what they needed in order to be made alive again. The story can and does go on, but the graph is plainly that of God’s gracious resurrecting of the dead.

2.     In Genesis 7, there is a flood that drowns the human race in its own sinfulness. As verse 23 has it, “Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark.” End of story. But no, the first verse of the next chapter reads, “But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark.” I once heard a sermon in which the preacher argued that the point of the Noah story is that the human race always comes through. Baloney! The point of the Noah story is that God always remembers. The only hope for any of us who are either drowned by or cast away upon the flood of our sins is that God might remember us as he did Noah. The pattern is death and resurrection.

3.     In Genesis 22, the command that Abraham should sacrifice his son Isaac spells the end not only of that one individual but of the entire promise regarding Abraham’s descendants. End of story. But suddenly God intervenes to save the situation. And “Abraham called the name of the place, The Lord Will Provide.” He distinctly did not call it, We Can Make It. The pattern is that of death and resurrection.

4.     The name “Jacob” means “the Supplanter.” As long as Jacob insisted upon living up to his name, his graph was a downward skid that came to its low point when he was forced to agonize over what would happen when he faced the brother he had so badly cheated. It is at that Gethsemane, then, in wrestling with God, that, in effect, “Jacob the Supplanter” had to die in order that the new man “Israel” (the one who strives with God until God’s will is done) might be made alive. This is a very powerful picture of death and resurrection.

5.     The story of Joseph graphs as a downward track from being rejected brother to being sold into slavery to being carried away into Egypt to being jailed as a slave in far-off Egypt. It is only at this low point that God intervenes to give Joseph the dream interpretation that will suddenly spring him into being made alive as a ruler in Egypt and savior of his own people. The pattern is not that of gradual human betterment but of death and resurrection.

6.     In 2 Samuel 12, King David sins with Bathsheba. In response to Nathan’s hooded parable, David’s own judgment is “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die.” To which Nathan comes back, “You are the man.” And this would be the end of the story—except for the fact that verse 13 reads, “The Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die.” David’s is the way to death—until God reverses it with his gracious resurrection.

7.     The Assyrian invaders are ready to destroy Jerusalem, and in Isaiah 10:33-11:1 the prophet describes how the Lord will come in judgment to level that whole forest (Assyrian and Israelite trees alike). End of story ... until, in 11:1, “there shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse”—of course, the tree of the Messiah in whom eventually (as Paul has it) all will be made alive. Here, perhaps for the first time, we have death and resurrection as the social pattern of world history rather than just isolated instances concerning individuals.

8.     Isaiah, then, in the great fifty-third chapter of the book, portrays the Suffering Servant of Yahweh who gives his life for the many, then to find himself restored and vindicated, even out of death itself. Here—perhaps for the first time—we encounter death as the voluntary giving of oneself, rather than committing suicide through one’s own sin. Yet the pattern is still very much that of death and resurrection. The servant does not save himself even by his perfect love and obedience; he is resurrected by God.

9.     In his thirty-seventh chapter, Ezekiel has a spectacular picture of broad-scale death and resurrection (that of an entire nation) in his vision of the valley filled with dry bones. What is so very apparent is that dry bones have absolutely no potential for making themselves alive again. Only a God of wonderful power and grace has any chance of bringing off this one.

10. As we come into the New Testament, we find our pattern being presented in some quite subtle but very relevant ways. Mark 8:34-35 reads: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”

11. Jesus’ “whoever would save his life” probably has reference to human moral triumphalism—and he says that the method won’t work. On the other hand, the voluntary losing of one’s life only to find it saved just has to imply the involvement of something on the order of a resurrection. How, apart from a resurrection, can losing one’s life be made to produce a saving of it? Here—perhaps for the first time—death and resurrection is presented as the deliberate principle and model for Christian ethics, for the whole of Christian behavior and action.

12. This brings us to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ own Good Friday crucifixion and Easter Sunday resurrection. It is significant that Mark devotes nearly half his Gospel just to this event and the Passion Week that forms its context. This death and resurrection is, of course, the paradigm to which all earlier variations point and from which all the following variations proceed. Here lies the pivot of our whole thesis and study.

13. Paul uses baptism as the connector for making Jesus’ own death and resurrection the model and motive of our own. In Romans 6, he says:

Have you forgotten that when we were baptized into union with Christ Jesus we were baptized into his death? By baptism we were buried with him, and lay dead, in order that, as Christ was raised from the dead in the splendor of the Father, so also we might set our feet upon the new path of life. For if we have become incorporate with him in a death like his, we shall also be one with him in a resurrection like his.... For in dying as he died, he died to sin, once for all, and in living as he lives, he lives to God. In the same way you must regard yourselves as dead to sin and alive to God, in union with Christ Jesus. (vv. 3-5, 10-11)

Think about it. In choosing to be baptized into union with Christ Jesus, you renounced any and all faith in gradualistic triumphalism, and signed into the pattern of death and resurrection.

14. In Revelation 12:10-11, John describes this victory and tells how it is won: “This [the time of Jesus’ resurrection] is the hour of victory for our God, the hour of his sovereignty and power, when his Christ comes into his rightful rule! For the accuser of our brothers is overthrown, who day and night accused them before our God. By the sacrifice of the Lamb they have conquered him, and by the testimony which they uttered; for they did not hold their lives too dear to lay them down.

We are talking now, of course, of God’s final victory in which Satan himself is conquered and all evil—individual, social, natural, supernatural, and cosmic—is forever done away. Here is achieved humanity’s ultimate state of justice, peace, and righteousness. How is it accomplished? Not by our gradual growth in morality, obviously. It is accomplished by “the sacrifice of the Lamb,” his death and resurrection. Nevertheless, John is clear that we humans have our own part to play in this triumph. And what is that? We are to testify and bear witness to what the Lamb has done. And, the text specifies, that can truly happen only when it is with us as it was with Jesus, that we do not hold our lives too dear to lay them down. The pattern of our witnessing is to be that of death and resurrection, just as it was for the One to whom we witness.

15. In his eleventh chapter, the Revelator gives the pattern an application to which we should pay most careful attention. As we saw earlier in this book, it has been, perhaps, in the life of the institutional church that there has been the strongest tendency to go the way of arky power and prestige. The customary understanding of the call of the church has been that it should grow in size and influence—gradually winning the status and following through which it can “Christianize” society and lead the world in moral development.

However, Revelation 11 gives an entirely different picture. In this vision, the faithful church is portrayed in the form of two witnesses who, dressed in sackcloth (not velvet), make their humble testimony in the face of a profoundly hostile world. They are olive trees (fruit bearers) and lamps (light bringers) in the service of their Lord. Their way—far from leading to glory and acceptance—leads directly to a self-giving martyrdom, from which they are raised up to victory through an explicit resurrection by God. The way of the church through the world, John tells us, definitely is meant to be that of death and resurrection.

16. The Revelator then specifies (20:6) that a Christian’s personal salvation, his hope of eternal life, lies not in any built-in immortality but in a resurrection as real and as bodily as that of Jesus himself: “This is the first resurrection. Happy, indeed, and one of God’s own people is the man who shares in this first resurrection! Upon such the second death has no claim; but they shall be priests of God and of Christ.”

17. Finally, in the opening of his twenty-first chapter, John describes death and resurrection as the way God’s New Creation works: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” (He could as well have called it a resurrected heaven and earth, because he obviously is thinking of renewal rather than a complete junking of the old order to start all over from scratch.) Again, “Now at last God has his dwelling among men!” A little later “He will wipe every tear from their eyes; there shall be an end to death [and how could that happen except through resurrection?] and to mourning and crying and pain; for the old order has passed away!” Once more, “Behold! I am making all things new! [resurrection again].” And finally, “A draught from the water-springs of life [resurrection life, no less] will be my free gift to the thirsty.”

Can there be any doubt that Scripture sees the completely anarchical grace of resurrection from the dead as being THE way universal history works? Is it not obvious that it puts no faith at all in the possibility that humanity’s sincere arky efforts might win the day for God and for the good?

Jacques Ellul insists that in spite of all the highly praised messianic movements he has observed in his long lifetime, he cannot discern that society is making any significant moral progress and, least of all, that it is well on the way toward getting itself saved and set right.

Ellul and other realistic historians like him believe the entire history of the race fails to show anything like large-scale, long-term moral progress. (Technological, cultural, intellectual progress, yes; but nothing that truly could be called “moral.”) The moral state of humanity seems to be pretty much of a low-level constant all the way through. Certainly, there is movement within the borders of this constancy. We may seem to be making progress on one front—although, at the same time, retrogressing on another. Moral gains made at one time don’t last; things slide back into their former state. In short, our graph of gradual moral triumph is a dream; the historical social data don’t support it.

From the viewpoint of Christian realism, then, we need to be skeptical of the continually repeated yet always excited predictions humanity is moving into a new age, that we are on the verge of a rebirth of justice and righteousness. Such predictors have the very same track record as those predicting the second of coming of Jesus—nobody’s ever been right yet.

Especially, Christian realists should be leery of the messianic claims made by every newest and brightest arky to come along: “Yes, we thought the Maccabean Revolt was it—but it wasn’t. We thought the Zealot Revolt was it—but it wasn’t. The Christianizing of the Roman Empire—but it wasn’t. The Enlightenment—but it wasn’t. The Bolshevik Revolution—but it wasn’t. The Student Free Speech Movement—but it wasn’t. The Sexual Revolution—but it wasn’t. The Viet-Cong Revolution—but it definitely wasn’t. The Here’s Life America campaign—but it wasn’t. President Kennedy’s Great Society—but it wasn’t. Admittedly, we have been wrong in the past. But not this time. This is the one that will turn things around. You can take it from us that this one is the real thing. The Feminist Movement is the one that will make it. Or Liberation Theology is the one that will make it. Or whatever Harvey Cox next tabs is the one that will make it.”

Christian realists need to know what is going on here. These are the confessions of faith, the glorifying of god—on the part of those who, not believing in the true God, face total despair for the world’s future unless they can find something in which to hope. The common name for the action is “whistling in the dark,” or what Isaiah calls “praying to a god that cannot save.” Christians, of course, should feel great sympathy for people caught in such a bind—even while steering completely clear of their enthusiasm for the arkys they take to be inspired by the god they look to for salvation.

But if the arkys cannot save, does that mean the whole human arky struggle for moral betterment has no significance, no value at all?

By no means! Actually, it turns out that Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass chessboard is an entirely accurate picture of humanity’s moral universe. As the Red Queen explained to Alice, “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

The human race is just that—a “race.” Humanity is not racing toward the kingdom, certainly. It is racing to hold its place, to keep itself held together where the Father can find it when comes the time for him to give it the kingdom. And this, we should know, is a desparate race. I don’t think most people appreciate how precarious is the status of humane existence and human morality. And I do not have in mind particularly the nuclear threat. My opinion is that there are moral threats that could be just as devastating and are moral threats even more imminent than that physical one. For what shall it profit us if we gain the whole world (by preserving its physical existence) and forfeit its moral life?

So, Christian realists don’t have to accept any arky theories about this or that messianic cause turning the world around and leading it into a new age—in fact, they had better not. They do, however, have a Christian calling (“As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world”—John 17:18) to be in there among the arkys, doing whatever can be done (like holding fingers in dikes) to prevent the whole ocean of evils from flooding out and turning to mud. Christians need to be there. But, just as important, they need to know what they are doing while there. They are not there to join the worldlings in their arky faith but to ignore the arkys in the service of God and neighbour.

Take me, for example. I am what is known in the trade as “an educator.” I have put in my time and am currently in good standing with that Grand Old Arky EDUCATION—perhaps the most arkyish of all in claiming to hold the keys to the salvation of the race. In education, I am a professor, a doctor of theology, author of the world’s only book on Christian Anarchy, which you likely have seen (here being the only place I can safely make that statement), and no end of other such dignities—with all the rights and privileges thereunto pertaining throughout the civilized world, as the president put it so neatly upon granting me my B.A. When it comes to EDUCATION, I am—as it might but probably ought not be put—one of the boys.

However, given to that arky though I be, I consider that I am still quite anarchical in my attitude toward it. I am in the arky but in no way of it. To my mind, I have not let the world of education push me into its arky mold but have been transformed by a renewal of my mind to prove what an unacceptable worship EDUCATION is. Rather than its molding me, I have been out to expose it for what it really is. Above all, I try to view the educational endeavor realistically.

I do not share Walter Rauschenbusch’s turn-of-the-century social-gospel faith that education inevitably spells growth in moral understanding and that, therefore, the establishment of the American system of universal public education would be the making of a godly nation. I don’t buy the commencement-address idea that what this old professor has been doing all these years is influencing young lives toward the purity and goodness he himself represents. The greater likelihood is that the kids have corrupted me. I laugh at the thought that, out of these portals, we are sending a new generation destined to claim the world for truth and right. If that is what education is supposed to do, why didn’t it work any better for the generation of student volunteers (our parents’ generation) that went out singing I Would Be True; Follow the Gleam; True-Hearted, Whole-Hearted, Faithful, and Loyal; and Lord, We Are Able? If moral idealism is what makes it, that would have been the generation. This one isn’t even interested in such sentiments.

I hold no illusions. I could point out any number of students for whom an education has done nothing—except enable them to make more money. I could point out students who would have better been left uneducated; their added “smarts” only make them more dangerous. I don’t claim to have turned any lives around, made any students “better persons” than they already were on the way to becoming on their own. Our educated world of today is in no way morally superior to uneducated worlds of the past. It may even be that education has created new moral problems of its own.

Yet in no way do I regret having given my life and energies to education. My hope is that things may not be quite as bad as they would be if I had not been there with my finger in the dike (even if, like as not, it turns out to have been the wrong dike, the dry dike, anyhow). But that’s all right. I’m convinced I’ve been where God wanted me. I have no problem in confessing myself the unworthiest of servants, because neither my self-worth, my salvation, nor my hope of the world’s salvation have ever been attached to arky performance. I have run the good race—not the race to get anywhere but only to keep things in place and not lose any more ground than we have to, which is as much as can ever be expected from the arkys. And if this assessment is realistic, I am much happier with it than with what is bound to be the extravagant unreality of my retirement dinner.

Something of this sort, I contend, describes the Christian’s role among the arkys—an important role, yet one completely anarchical and not at all according to the arky’s own terms. So I have been in education; but my faith has never been in EDUCATION. It doesn’t have to be, because I’ve already got a better God than that. I have one who can save. So, regardless of what my arky service comes to, I am with my anarchist brother, Ellul: “I may have had opportunity at times to bear witness to Jesus Christ. Perhaps through my words or my writing, someone met this Saviour, the only one, the unique one, beside whom all human projects are childishness; then, if this has happened, I will be fulfilled, and for that, glory to God alone.”

8. On More Ways than One Of Skinning Cats Or Accomplishing Other Good Ends

I think I understand why so many Christians find some sort of arky faith to be absolutely essential to their creed. The logic, heard on every side, runs thus: If the good people (we Christians, of course) don’t organize (as holy power blocs) to bestow our goodness upon the world, no improvement will ever take place and society will simply continue its slide into hell. The argument assumes there is only one possible way social good can happen.

It may come as a surprise to hear that I am quick to agree that this is the correct and, indeed, inevitable conclusion—if we are supposing that political reality (that is, the reality of human power and organisation) is the only reality there is; that God has no hands but our hands; that ours is not a God who takes it upon himself to intervene in humanity’s public affairs. If God is left out (or edged out) of the picture, then it undoubtedly is correct that our one and only hope of social salvation is for good people with their messianic arkys to struggle against the forces of evil in order to install a new and just regime.

If this is indeed our only hope, we ought at least to be honest enough to recognize just how forlorn a hope it is. As we have seen already, from a theological-biblical perspective, Karl Barth has shown how presumptuous and wrongheaded it is for any crowd of human beings to claim they have such mastery of “the good” they can power it into place as the society of peace and justice.

Also, we have seen that the idea of a just revolution of the saints is by no means an invention of the late twentieth century but has been tried time and time and time again. And yet, whether such revolution succeeds or fails, more often than not the social gain is zilch—or less! The direct-action method of messianic arkys is hardly justified by its track record.

Finally, we have heard the personal testimony of Jacques Ellul—a saint as qualified as any, both as a biblical theologian on the one hand and a socio-political scientist on the other—who laboured for years in different attempts at the Christian transformation of society and came away with the opinion that the method is unrealistic and unworkable.

Nevertheless, if this be the only possible way of getting the cat skinned, we will have to go with it—no matter what. Yet honesty would compel us to admit that our hope, now, is little better than no hope at all.

However, for at least the last couple of chapters, I have been trying to bust us out of this closed, constricted, no-option system that says, ‘There is only one way; if it’s going to be done, we are the ones who will have to do it out of our own resources.” Hear then the gospel, the liberating word of God. ‘There is more than one way to skin a cat” (I’m certain it’s in there somewhere; my concordance must be faulty).

Politics is not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. There is also theology that can speak of actual, socio-political differences made by the presence of God. There is a way for things to happen that is altogether different from the human-bound way of gradual improvements leading toward moral triumph—this way, of course, being the way of resurrection made possible by the grace and power of one who is Wholly-Other-than-Human.

In this chapter, I want to describe how another way can and did work in a matter of radical, broad-scale, structural social change usually thought of as being possible only through revolution and class struggle.

We have already heard but need to be reminded again that Christians can do and have done a great deal of good in the way of social service and action—and that without at all forming political power blocs, without taking any warlike position against any government or social institution, without presuming to condemn or fight anybody. Modern revolutionaries are wrong in sneering at these efforts as being insignificant compared to their big push to turn the world right-side-up.

In fact, although the results are neither quick nor spectacular, it may be that humble personal service (human beings serving one another for the love of Jesus) has done more to change the world than any revolution. Not through pressure and imposition, but simply through modeling, such self-sacrificing service cannot but have some healing effect on the social structures around it. Would it be correct to say that—no matter how bad off some of these nations may be at present—there is no country into which Christian missionaries and service workers have gone that is not now better off in the way of social justice than would be the  case if that Christian presence had never been there? Revolutionary liberation is not the only way of bringing about social change. There is more than one way.... However, the case study here presented speaks of a way that is a much more direct action than simply Christian modeling.

In another of my books (Towering Babble, pp.169-79) I developed what I called “voluntary self-subordination” as being the uniquely Christian way—not necessarily for skinning cats but for accomplishing many other good ends. Just the verbal contrast between this phrase and “arky contest” is, of course, conspicuous. But as the central thought of this concept—its most fundamental and essential statement—I cited Jesus’ solemn decree from Mark 8.34-35: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel will save it.” Although we haven’t time to say more here, that book develops the idea in depth and demonstrates that it does indeed characterize the whole New Testament.

Now it is my observation that a goodly number of modern Christians are willing at least to consider voluntary self-subordination as a method of operation for their personal, one-to-one relationships with other individuals. However, when it comes to political reform, radical social change, human liberation, the accomplishment of social justice, or whatever you choose to call it, they don’t see the method as fitting into the picture at all. On this level, they believe “justice” can only be won through a political struggle for equality.

In this regard, then, Jesus and the New Testament become something of an embarrassment to Christian social activists. According to their view, Jesus and those that followed him should have set the pattern for modern-day reformers out demanding and fighting for a just society. The trouble is they don’t fit the mould and can’t convincingly be made to do so.

The embarrassment becomes even greater with the realization that the early church lived in a society where the terrible injustice of human slavery was common practice. Yet, rather than fighting or even protesting this evil, the church apparently overlooked it—and that not only in the life of the larger society but even within its own circles. And it follows that Paul’s little letter to Philemon may represent the greatest embarrassment of all. Here, circumstances as much as force the apostle into a direct confrontation with the institution of slavery—and he appears to avoid it completely. He makes no move to protest the injustice of the practice, speaks not one word in condemnation of Philemon’s being a slave-owner, makes not a hint of a witness to social justice and human rights.

However, I read Philemon quite differently from what the social activists do. So I will now undertake to establish this small letter as the very model of social justice accomplished through Christian self-subordination. It is a picture of liberation and social change so radical that the proponents of arky justice haven’t had a glimmer of what it’s all about.

Philemon is a most frustrating book—a brief personal note that doesn’t begin to tell us what we need to know in order to understand it. All we know is this: Paul is writing to his friend Philemon regarding Philemon’s slave, Onesimus. Yet, although he belongs to Philemon, Onesimus has just spent time with Paul and is now carrying the letter from Paul to his master.

 

 

Philemon lives at Colossae and is a leader in the church there. Whether there or somewhere else (the book of Acts never places Paul at Colossae), Paul had apparently converted Philemon and become his close Christian brother. There seems little doubt that Colossians—Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae—and this note to a private individual in Colossae belong together. Most likely, Tychicus, one of Paul’s lieutenants, delivered the letter to the church, while Onesimus delivered the note to his master (Col. 4:7-9).

At the time of his writing, Paul is in prison—although he isn’t thoughtful enough to tell us where. Because the matter has something to do with the rest of the story, we are going to guess that he is in Ephesus. (Acts never has Paul in prison in Ephesus, but it does have him spending enough time in the city that an imprisonment would not be incredible. It is not like Paul to stay out of jail for two years in a row.) What makes Ephesus a good guess is that it is the major city nearest the little town of Colossae, about a hundred miles off. It is, accordingly, by far the likeliest spot for a Colossian slave to try to lose himself—as well as have a chance of coming upon Paul. Then too, it is the most likely spot from which Paul would write that he hopes soon to be released and would Philemon have a guest room ready for him (v.22).

Onesimus, we know, is Philemon’s slaveboy (“my child, whose father I have become” Paul calls him in v.10, which could make Onesimus as young as a teen-ager). The name “Onesimus,” by the way, is based on the Greek root meaning “beneficial,” “of benefit,” or “useful.” It is a name an owner might well give to a slave in the hope of its influencing his character. Paul uses that name in word-plays both in verses 11 and 20.

Onesimus is Philemon’s slave. Yet he has just been with Paul in Ephesus rather than with Philemon in Colossae. Paul states that he has been “useless” rather than living up to his name “useful” (v. 11). And Onesimus’s returning to Philemon raises questions as to how he will be received. Only this much the letter actually tells us, but it can hardly add up to anything other than “runaway.” We don’t know whether Onesimus knew (or knew about) Paul and so sought him out, or whether he just happened to be thrown into the same jail cell with him. In either case, he is now not only a spiritual son but even a co-worker of the apostle.

In the note Onesimus delivers, Paul is probably asking three things of Philemon: (1) At the very least, he is asking that Onesimus be received with kindness and forgiveness rather than with the treatment customary for a runaway slave—legally, anything up through torture and death. (2) Surely, he is also asking that Onesimus to be released from slavery (“no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother”—v. 16). And (3) there are strong hints that Paul wants Onesimus released to come back and serve with Paul at Ephesus (vv. 13, 20: “I want some benefit (some ‘Onesimus’) from you”).

This is as much as the epistle itself can tell us. So let me now try an interpretation.

In running away from his master, the slave Onesimus was doing precisely what modern revolutionism says he should do. He was moving to effect his own liberation—get out from under terrible oppression and claim the equity of being a freeman alongside Philemon. Although it was a slave revolt of only one person, it was an entirely praiseworthy one—a blow against gross injustice and a move toward a truly just society. This is liberation theology—and a model of what all slaves should do. So, far from feeling any sort of guilt, Onesimus should have been proud of what he had done.

Of course, I don’t know how Onesimus did feel, but let’s assume he felt good about his thrust toward freedom. Yet the evidence would indicate that, particularly after he became a Christian and began to learn from Paul, he started to have second thoughts. His way of getting liberated did not leave him as free as he had expected. Running away, he must now have sensed, left something to he desired as a freeing action. Being a runaway slave is neither as secure nor as relaxed a position as one might hope. Always to have to be looking over your shoulder to see who is coming to get you can hardly be the truest sort of freedom. And I wonder whether anyone can ever run away or lie or cheat or kill—even in the name of freedom—without feeling pangs of remorse and guilt in the process.

Further, as a Christian, Onesimus must have realized that his act of freeing” himself had to have had a reverse effect on Philemon. Onesimus’s grab for equality without a doubt created an adversary alignment that made Philemon “the enemy,” who now had been put down, cheated, robbed of a valuable possession he undoubtedly had acquired in all honesty. No, there were all sorts of things about Onesimus’s new freedom which just could not be right.

So, with Paul’s help (although certainly not at his demand), Onesimus freely chose another method of liberation—that of voluntary, Christian self-subordination. He decided to go back, to exercise his freedom by giving it up, to save his life by losing it.

Think what this action had to mean for Onesimus. Here was a runaway slave—guilty from every legal standpoint—offering to put himself at the mercy of his offended master. His only defence is a scrap of paper signed with what he hopes is the magic name, “Paul.” It is hardly likely that Onesimus stood afar off and sent Tychicus in with the note, awaiting Philemon’s response before deciding which way to move. Hardly. Onesimus must have himself handed that note to Philemon, putting not just his hard-won freedom but his very life into jeopardy and ready to accept whatever might result—fully convinced that, whatever did result, this was the only way to true freedom.

Consider, then, that Onesimus’s original running away had not been a truly free action—it was too much motivated by self-interest, too much driven by self-serving needs and desires. It was rather his going back, his voluntary subordination, his willingness to lose his life for Christ’s sake and the gospel—only this was free in a way no other action could be.

Onesimus’s earlier running away had not been a freeing action, either. We already have imagined the side effects that led him to want to undo that one. We can be certain, however, that his going back did create all sorts of freedom. We can say that even without knowing how Philemon responded—and bear in mind that we don’t know. All we have is the note. Scripture gives us not one word as to how it was received. And this is how it should be. Onesimus’s action was right, no matter what the consequences. My belief is that Onesimus would have wanted to go back—would have felt himself freed in going back—even if he had known ahead of time that he would be returning to slavery, torture, and execution. Yet, even at that extremity, consider the freedoms that would have ensued.

Through his act of repentance, reconciliation, restitution, and asking forgiveness, Onesimus would have freed himself from the guilt of his previous action. He would have freed his relationship to Philemon of all its animosity, ill will, and adversarial conflict. And although it does not figure into our customary calculations, don’t assume that a dead slave is for that reason unfree. Because he had acted as a child of God, Onesimus had guaranteed for himself the coming revelation of what his sponsor Paul called “the glorious liberty of the children of God.” What Paul wrote to the Galatians he could as well have addressed to his Philemon-bound friend: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery [slavery to what the world calls ‘freedom’).” Most certainly, Onesimus is included when Paul says, “For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freeman of the lord.” We have all sorts of arky-liberated people running around who don’t begin to know the sort of freedom experienced by the Christian slaveboy who may voluntarily have gone to his death.

 

 

Because the success of voluntary self-subordination is not measured by its outward results, the story of Onesimus is right—is the very model of Christian action—even though we don’t know what consequences there may have been. Yet this, of course, is not to suggest that the outcome had to be that of enslavement and death. Indeed, the probability is quite otherwise. Paul, apparently, was a rather good judge of character; so, if he was reading his pal Philemon at all correctly, then Onesimus likely was soon on his way back to Ephesus with Tychicus. It would take a pretty tough nut to resist the kind words and loving arguments of Paul’s most crucial effort in salesmanship. I don’t think there’s a chance in the world that Philemon could have held out against it. And finally—and to my mind most conclusive—is the fact that the letter survived.

Think about it: If anything had happened to Onesimus other than his being freed and sent on his way to Paul, who would have wanted to save the letter? It was saved, obviously. So who would have wanted it? Well, it belonged to Philemon, and he undoubtedly valued it. Yet my guess is that (except for his Christian inhibitions) Onesimus would have knocked him down and taken it, if Philemon had shown reluctance about giving it up. After all, to Philemon it was a nice letter from a friend; to Onesimus, however, it was his reprieve from death and charter of freedom. In any case, that note was preserved for some period of years until it could be incorporated as a one-of-a-kind entry in the New Testament.

 

 

Is that the story? Well, maybe so and maybe not. New Testament scholar John Knox is the one who ferreted out what may be its continuation. We have to go clear beyond the New Testament now, but there is more.

Fifty to sixty years after the most probable time of Paul’s writing, there was, in Syria, a Bishop Ignatius who was apprehended by the Romans and escorted overland to Rome, where, eventually, he was tried and executed. Because Ignatius was a prominent figure in the church, as his party came to (or even close to) any place where Christians lived, the congregations sent out representatives to visit and offer him hospitality. After he arrived in Rome, then, Ignatius sent “thank you notes” to a number of the churches that had hosted him. These letters—dated about A.D. 110—have been preserved (not in the New Testament, obviously, but as some of the earliest Christian literature outside the New Testament). One of them is addressed to the church at Ephesus, and in that letter Ignatius waxes eloquent about the welcome he had received from the Ephesian delegation headed by their Bishop Onesimus.

Hold on! Don’t go jumping to conclusions until I tell you; then we can all jump to the conclusion at once. There is nothing in the way of positive proof, and Onesimus is not a completely rare name. Yet the place and timing are right. If our slaveboy went back to help Paul in Ephesus, he could have worked his way up in the congregation and been a seventy-some-year-old bishop at the time Ignatius came through.

Moreover, in the first six paragraphs of his letter, Ignatius names Bishop Onesimus three times and refers to him eleven other times. And it is in this same section of the letter (and not elsewhere) that scholars also pick up subtle echoes of the language of Paul’s letter to Philemon—including one play on the word “benefit” that is almost identical to Paul’s. Apparently, Ignatius knows the Philemon letter and is teasing its language into his compliments of Bishop Onesimus. You can decide how conclusive that is in proving that Ignatius knows which Onesimus the Ephesian bishop is, but I am ready to jump. Now!

Here, we must move beyond Ignatius, but the plot continues to thicken. Scholars are pretty well convinced that the letters of Paul did not come into the New Testament one by one, from here and there. The greater likelihood is that someone became interested in Paul at an early date and made inquiries among his congregations as to whether they had any of his letters and would be willing to share copies. It would have been, then, this earlier collection of letters that was introduced into the New Testament as a unit.

Where would such collecting most likely have taken place? Among the congregations established by Paul, Ephesus is as well situated and thus as good a guess as any. And who is most likely to have been the moving spirit behind such a project? Why not Bishop Onesimus?—he has as good a reason for remembering and loving Paul as anybody (and a whole lot better reason than most). But with this suggestion, now, we get a real nice answer to one of the most troublesome questions regarding the epistle to Philemon. Within the Bible, it is a unique specimen—a brief personal note addressed to a private individual on a matter involving neither the life of a congregation nor the teaching of the faith. So why should it be in the New Testament? And how did it get there in the first place?

Without recourse to “Bishop Onesimus,” I don’t see that those questions are answerable. With “Bishop Onesimus,” they become easy. If Onesimus is the collector of Paul’s letters, he would, of course, be eager that “his” letter be part of it. Likewise, the Ephesian congregation would very much want this letter included, as a gesture of respect and gratitude—and a matter of record—regarding their own slaveboy bishop. The very presence of the letter within the New Testament may be the strongest proof that the Ephesian bishop of A.D. 110 is indeed the very same person as Philemon’s slave.

Earlier—under the possibility that Onesimus actually was returned to slavery and executed—we portrayed the minimum of freedom, liberation, and justice that might have resulted from his going back. Now—whether or not it is the maximum—we have portrayed just how incredibly far God may have taken that slaveboy’s Christlike decision to take up his cross and go back. And Onesimus’s personal rise in equity from slave to bishop is only a starter. The Ephesian congregation seems to have received the godly leadership that not only made it a strong church but may even have spelled its survival into the second century (it is not evident that all of Paul’s congregations lasted so long). Most of all, it may be that God used Onesimus’s going back to give us the one-fourth of our New Testament written by Paul and so preserve an understanding of the faith that has been of untold value in the life and history of the church to the present day. When God is in the picture, who’s to say how “useful” one “Onesimus” can be?

What is more, I am ready to say that—in a representative way—the example of Onesimus marks the truer freeing of more slaves than all the emancipation proclamations ever proclaimed and all the class warfare ever warred. In this case God sounds the death knell of slavery (all sorts of slavery) for the whole of creation for all time. There is not the slightest doubt that the Christian church—the Onesimian church—went on to become the greatest force for freeing slaves the world has ever seen. And it strikes me that the Onesimian method of ending slavery is the only sure method of doing so. The secular way of “revolutionary arky contest” may be quicker and more spectacular, but it is also far less dependable, carrying all sorts of negative side effects. Emancipation proclamations and civil wars may create a degree of justice and eliminate some aspects of slavery. But they also create all sorts of animosities and hatreds, leave battlefields strewn with corpses, and take us out of slavery (as in America) only to plunge us into the bitterness of racial segregation.

The Onesimian approach is much more powerful. It may take a while, but no slaveholder can forever hold out against the loving persuasions of a Paul, the loving self-sacrifice of an Onesimus, or the loving Spirit of an Almighty God. That owner actually has a much better chance of resisting political pressure and the violence of class warfare. Moreover, the Onesimian way, rather than demanding the denunciation and destruction of the moral dignity of the slaveholder; offers him a gracious way out. Onesimus was liberated without Philemon’s having to be demeaned in the process. Best of all, of course, to go the Onesimian way leaves everyone involved—slave, owner, and apostle—as brothers in Christ. The side effects are all positive, without a trace of contention’s negativity.

Yet the most essential distinction, I suggest, is this: The political struggle for liberation rests entirely on human wisdom, idealism, and moral ability. It thinks there is only one way.... It operates in a closed system that neither seeks nor expects anything more than its human method can be calculated to achieve—though seldom do the final results come to even that much. Human beings (and especially well-intentioned doers of good) are noted for overestimating the power of their own piety.

With Onesimus, things are quite otherwise. Because his was a theological action taken on the suggestion of God, in the service of God, through the Spirit of God, with the enablement of God, and to the glory of God—this action invited God in and urged him to make of it what he would. The results? Completely incalculable—even to the preserving of Paul’s for the ages. There is absolutely no telling how much good, how much social change, how much freeing of slaves, how much gospel, how much kingdom, might follow from an Onesimian laying down of One’s life for God.

Finally, then, consider how totally Onesimus’s was “another way”—an anarchical way bearing no likeness at all to the accepted arky method of skinning cats. Not one of the characteristics of arky faith is to be found.

To be sure, slaves are freed and the classless society is formed. Yet, throughout the procedure, each of the principals (the slave, the man of God) acts and is acted toward simply as the human individual he is—brothers three, only that and nothing more. No one (least of all the man of God directing the action) tries to use Onesimus as a symbol of the “oppressed but righteous poor” whose consciousness of injustice must be raised to the point that he will join the class struggle. Paul, rather, convinces him to quit “fighting it” and go back—even into slavery. No one (least of all the man of God directing the action) tries, on the other hand, to use Philemon as a symbol of “the evil, oppressing, slaveholding class,” exposing his injustice as a means of recruiting class warriors to fight against him. No one (least of all the man of God directing the action) has any interest in anybody’s fighting anybody, in even seeing the matter as an adversary alignment.

The problem of human slavery is, of course, a political one. But our “theologian of liberation,” being truly a man of God, says, “There just has to be more than the one political way of skinning this cat (that is, the way that is limited to human methods and programs). Let us act theologically (that is, in a way that both obeys God and, at the same time, invites him into the action). Let’s try it that way—and see where God chooses to take it.”

So they did. And so He did. And just see how far it went. You know, it’s true: There is more than one way....

9. Justice, Freedom, and Grace: The Fruits of Anarchy

Justice, Freedom, Grace—these three—and, biblically, the greatest of these is Grace. This is the case because, biblically, both Justice and Freedom are gifts (or creations) of God’s Grace. And thus, though our arky-faith social activists have so much to say about Justice and Freedom, even in this they are biblically off centre, for the fact that they do not have (and cannot admit) the reality of Grace to serve as these virtues’ source and context.

Biblically, “justice” is the end result of God’s making things right according to his definition of “right”—and “freedom” comes like Paul says: “For freedom Christ has set us free.” It follows that both biblical justice and biblical freedom, from the outset, are assumed to be consequences, or end products, of God’s work of grace. Apart from grace, justice and freedom are impossible goals.

For a starter, then, we need to work at the concept of “grace.” At several different points, Paul calls grace a “gift.” And that’s fine; grace is always a gift and, by definition, cannot be anything else—such as a reward. Yet we should be careful not to turn the phrase around to say that any and all of God’s gifts are of the character of grace. To do so weakens grace by broadening it out over too much territory.

When we think of God’s “gifts,” for instance, or say a table “grace” (a poor word for what it identifies), most often we proceed to thank him for the blessings of this good earth (for health and strength and daily food), for family, friends, etc. Now those are all certainly fine gifts; they are your many blessings that should be counted one by one. Yet, if we stop with those, we have not yet touched what Scripture intends by grace. To avoid confusion, we would do well to identify those things as “blessings”—the fruits of God’s “beneficence”—and reserve “grace” for that gift of God which goes a whole level deeper and represents a radically different quality from these.

My Dictionary of New Testament Theology tells me that, clear back with the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for grace identified not simply “nice gifts for nice people,” but rather the rescue operation of pulling out those who were far gone—even if they had created the predicament for themselves, even if they had rejected the Lifeguard’s advice and been insulting to him in the process.

In Romans 5:12-18, the apostle Paul gets the New Testament concept of grace even more closely defined. There he suggests that grace is God’s restoring us to life after we have committed suicide—made ourselves dead—with our sin; our defiance of God; our unwillingness to accept his love, help, and guidance.

Obviously, Paul cannot be thinking simply of physical death when he includes himself and his alive and breathing readers in the words “so death spread to all men because all men sinned.” His thought, certainly, is that all of us are already dead. I take him to mean, therefore, that—as far as having any chance of making it on our own, of being able to avert the degeneration of ourselves and our society, of having the capacity to get ourselves alive again through self-invented means of artificial respiration—by any of these indications we are as much as dead. Unless there should come the grace of God, we’re dead.

In that situation, we have no grounds at all for expecting that such grace will be forthcoming. In dying as we all have done, we simply have been getting what we asked for. After we have treated him so badly, God is under no obligation at all to jump in and rescue us, no obligation at all to give life to those who have already refused it from him in preferring their own brand of death.

I—along with Paul and the song writer Henry F. Lyte—am ready to affirm that “change and decay in all around I see.” From where I stand (and from the newspapers I read) it seems plain that we live (if you can call it that) in the midst of a dead (or at least far from “living”) humanity. Indeed, who can dispute the strong note of Scripture that, were it not for innumerable past rescue operations of God’s grace, the human race would not have survived as long as it has? No, Paul is right: In Adam—that is, on our own, on the basis of nothing more than our own goodness and power—none of us, either individually or corporately, shows the ghost of a chance of making it. We are the dead and the dying.

Thus, in an earlier chapter, we examined how an arky faith works and what it sees in terms of human moral accomplishment—trusting only in man and not in God. We implied that all such accomplishment is useless and must die before God begins to work. We also implied that resurrection is perhaps the one word in the dictionary that can be spelled in no way other than g-r-a-c-e.

Similarly, in our previous chapter, Onesimus’s first try at freedom (through the arky method of rebelling and running away, the freedom that proved so much less than satisfactory)—this freedom did not call upon or make any use of grace. Yet, of course, in his second try at freedom (in the completely unarkycal action of voluntarily going back) Onesimus was doing nothing other than throwing himself upon the grace of God. Clearly, only that freedom founded upon grace proved real.

Both arky faith and Christian Anarchy are committed to “justice,” but only anarchy understands that justice needs grace. Both arky faith and Christian Anarchy are dedicated to “freedom,” but only anarchy understands that freedom, also, needs grace. Paul, then, gives us another presentation of grace that may explain why, in our arky faith, we so often find grace unwelcome and even threatening.

In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul talks about the overwhelmingly wonderful “visions and revelations of the Lord” he had received. But, he recognizes, these very blessings easily could make him feel self-important and think too highly of himself. So he says, “To keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

Two points here are plain:

18. “Grace” comes from God alone. Ultimately, of course, ‘The power of Christ” is the power of resurrecting the dead, the power of bringing back those who are far gone. No more than Paul could manage the taking of the “thorn” from his own flesh can the world devise its own equivalent of grace that would effect a “de-thorning” of itself. No, grace comes from God or it isn’t grace at all.

19. The only possible receptor of divine grace is human weakness. As long as anyone is feeling elated about himself, self-confident and self-sufficient, there is no way he will even consider the possibility of grace—even if God be perfectly ready to offer it. One simply cannot know the grace of being rescued, of being resurrected from the dead, if he hasn’t been willing to admit that he’s out of his depth, that he’s in trouble, that realistically he’s dead. No, human weakness is the one true counterpart, the only possible receptor, for divine grace.

Arky faith, we now will see, is actually prohibitive of grace on both these counts. Earlier we made the distinction between the political (that which operates entirely in terms of human method and programs) and the theological (that which operates solely from trust in God whose presence changes the course of history). Arky faith (by definition, the belief that the outcome of history is determined by the victory of good human arkys over the bad ones) is essentially political in nature. So arky faith can’t manage any real concept of “grace,” because grace can have no source other than God and arky faith is ultimately a faith in human method rather than in a gracious God.

Yet Paul’s second point is even more directly relevant. Because arky faith presupposes struggle and contest as the given means of the good’s victory in history, the arky vehicles of that good as much as always must operate out of strength. Weakness (or sin) is the last thing a contending arky can afford to confess of itself. Yet self-defensiveness, the strong assertion of one’s own righteous deserving, is the hallmark of our age, whether on the level of the individual or of our corporate arkys. Because either “justice” or “freedom” (as we like to define them) lies precisely in “fighting for your rights,” gaining what you or your people deserve, the necessary action must be that of establishing at all costs the moral strength and superiority of your own good arky over against the guilt and moral weakness of the opposing bad arky. Obviously, in such a setup, even the idea of grace will be a threat to the very possibility of justice. For me to admit in myself any sort of weakness, defect, or sin calling for the ministrations of God’s grace would also, in effect, be giving ammunition to my enemy. To admit that I am dead and that this death is what I truly deserved would be to put me out of the contest completely. Arky faith simply cannot afford the idea of grace.

This “gracelessness” shows up on another level as well. God’s grace toward us (what we shall call “vertical grace”) clearly is meant to spin off as graciousness among ourselves (what shall be called “horizontal grace”). Of course, horizontal grace is not at all the same phenomenon as vertical grace: we humans have neither the power nor the will that can rescue or redeem another, and certainly nothing that can actually resurrect the dead. Indeed, we might do well to identify the horizontal variety simply as graciousness and reserve the term grace for the vertical variety alone.

Nevertheless, there is a likeness and a relationship. “Graciousness” is the awareness of our own weakness that makes us willing to go easy on the weaknesses of others, the awareness of logs in our own eyes that makes us lenient regarding specks in other people’s. Graciously, we are ready, now, to be patient with them, understanding of them, non-judgemental toward them, forgiving of them, willing to overlook what we otherwise would be inclined to make a big fuss about. And there is a second side of graciousness that is just as important. It is the readiness to recognize and appreciate all the graciousness that has been shown me—perhaps even by some of my enemies.

The connection between divine grace and human graciousness is a direct one. Finding the idea of grace subversive of our efforts toward justice, we have never truly been open to the experience of God’s grace toward us. And never having really known grace there, we don’t know what it calls for or feels like on the horizontal plane, either. Living in a social dogfight in which everyone is out to get the bone to which he knows he’s entitled, we find horizontal graciousness to be just as inappropriate as the vertical sort. We live in a world that has no room for grace.

Of course, when it means being gracious to people we like, there’s no problem. Yet grace is truly grace, not where it comes easily, but only where it comes very hard indeed. (And don’t suppose that we are such nice people that God must find it easy to be gracious toward us.) But I must say I have been frightened at times to discover how mean and just plain graceless good Christians can be toward the bad people they have come to designate as “enemy.”

One small example will show what I have in mind. Some time ago now, President Reagan spoke before a conference of professional women and, obviously in an effort to be friendly and complimentary, said something to the effect that women are to be credited with having civilized the race, getting the poor, barbaric males out of the cave and into some decent clothes. Whether the president’s remark was a boo-boo or not, it was received any way but graciously. Rather than being willing to overlook anything, those women plainly were intent to pick up on anything they could make a scene over—which they proceeded to do.

Had the speaker been a woman and made the remark, the likelihood is that it would have been greeted with laughter and applause. Had it been made by almost anyone other than President Reagan, even if the wording were perceived as being a bit awkward and insensitive, it would have been graciously overlooked. No, plainly it was not the remark but the identity of the speaker that brought forth viciousness where there should have been grace.

You see, long before the president entered the room, these women (whether rightly or wrongly) had him identified as a “bad guy,” “the enemy.” And according to the rules of arky contest, when you spot a weakness in the enemy, the thing to do is latch on to it, dramatize it, and exploit it to his humiliation and loss. Otherwise, to practice graciousness—overlooking and forgiving an adversary’s weakness—would be to miss a good chance for casting the first stone, passing up a made-to-order opportunity for exposing his wickedness and advancing one’s own righteous cause. Is it not true that today’s enthusiastic fight for justice and liberation actually brings with it a loss of felt need for God’s vertical grace, at the same time introducing an ugly gracelessness that poisons our horizontal relationships?

However, in contradistinction, my earlier book, again (Towering Babble, chaps. 6-7), includes a detailed study of the biblical traditions of justice and, by implication, freedom. “Justice,” there, turns out to be nothing like our fight for equality and human rights, our good arkys gaining power over and demolishing the evil ones. No, that concept of justice is seen to be an inheritance from our secular juridical tradition—which is not to deny that it may well be the highest concept of justice of which political thought is capable. But, biblically and theologically, “justice” is the situation created when the one true “Judge Jehovah” renders a “judgment” that has the effect of “justifying” and making right whoever and whatever needs “justification.” The biblical concept does not make it necessary for adversaries to align themselves against one another, and nowhere does it indicate that one set of “just” people must break the power of another “unjust” set. In consequence, directly contrary to the harsh political concepts of justice and freedom, the justice and freedom described in the Bible always include, never exclude, grace.

Just a few texts can be taken as typical and used to make the point here. Isaiah 1:21-27 is pointed and powerful:

How the faithful city	has become a harlot,
	she that was fill of justice!
Righteousness lodged in her,	but now murderers.
Your princes are rebels	and companions of thieves.
Everyone loves a bribe	and runs after gifts.
They do not defend the fatherless,	and the widow’s cause does not come to them.
Therefore the Lord says,
I will turn my hand against you	and will smelt away your dross as with lye
	and remove all your alloy.
And I will restore your judges as at the first,	and your counsellors as at the beginning.
Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city.
Zion shall be redeemed by justice.

 

Notice that, with the rebellious princes on the one hand and the fatherless and widows on the other, we have the makings of an oppressing-versus-oppressed class distinction. Unfortunately, there being no “social activist” on hand to spot it, to raise the class consciousness and instigate the class warfare, nothing of the sort develops. Even more unfortunately, Judge Jehovah’s moral standard being what it is, everyone is found guilty and there is not left the makings of a holy arky, a Justice and Freedom Party he could elect to contest the arky of evil. With no help to be had from any of us good people, God sees no alternative but to create justice in his own anarchical way.

It is plain that that way does involve punishment, retribution, and the breaking of the power of the evil arky. However, because that evil arky is universal in membership, God’s is an entirely different action from one human arky taking it upon itself to wreak righteous judgment upon another. It is precisely in this regard that Markus Barth once explained why the New Testament forbids us to act as judges toward one another, demanding rather that we leave all vengeance to God.

Even Isaiah’s “punishment language” makes clear that the ultimate intention behind it is cleansing; and the progress of the passage then moves to a redemption that could as well be called “resurrection.” What Barth pointed out is simply that, in our justice-making zeal, we humans rate among the best in passing out righteous condemnation, damnation, and punishment. However, when it comes to the justifying act of redemption and resurrection, we just do not have the means (we haven’t the remotest beginning of the means) to carry it out. So, if there is no chance of our seeing the justice-process through to its justifying conclusion, we would better let God do it his way from the outset.

However, the major point to be made is that, where political justice necessarily is prohibitive of grace, Biblical justice, God’s justice, is as much as synonymous with grace. God’s justice is not a program that has the party of the innocent-oppressed contending to get what they deserve; it is a program that has every party involved being justified (made right) quite apart from anyone’s deserving anything. “God’s justifying of whoever and what all will accept it”: call that “justice,” call that “freedom,” call that “grace,” call that “resurrection,” it all comes to the same thing. Admittedly, the Isaiah passage opens with a justice of God that damns Zion. Yet that in itself leads to and concludes in the line proclaiming that justice shall also redeem Zion. If I may say so, such “grace-justice that redeems”—that is indeed one rare justice—one hardly to be found among us or even our holy arkys, one obviously to be found only in the God who invented and controls both justice and grace.

A second citation—this one from Isaiah 45:19-23—will make the concept of “grace-justice” even more explicit. Biblical talk of justice always has reference to “Judge Jehovah” as the one whose “judgment” eventually brings about the “justification” of the guilty defendant. Accordingly, the mental imagery which may be in the background of all biblical justice talk (and which moves into the foreground with some frequency) is that of a trial transpiring in Judge Jehovah’s courtroom. And that is a Hebrew courtroom, we need to bear in mind, not a Greek or Roman or Western one—there’s a difference. The following picture is one of the Bible’s best—one that Paul brings over into Philippians 2.

I the Lord speak the truth,
I declare what is right.
Assemble yourselves and come,
	draw near together,
	you survivors of the nations!
They have no knowledge
	who carry about their wooden idols,
and keep on praying to a god
	that cannot save.
Declare and present your case;
	let them take counsel together!
Who told this long ago?
	who declared it of old?
Was it not I, the Lord?
	And there is no other god besides me,
a righteous God and a Savior;
	there is none besides me.
Turn to me and be saved,
	all the ends of the earth!
	For I am God, and there is no other.
By myself I have sworn,
	from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness
	a word that shall not return:
“To me every knee shall bow,
	every tongue shall swear.”

 

There is enough juridical terminology scattered throughout this passage to make it certain that the courtroom metaphor is meant to control the whole. There is only One who is qualified to serve as Judge of all the earth, who not only can say what justice is but also is capable of bringing it to be the actual state of affairs. The defendant in this instance is not God’s own city, his own people unfortunately gone wrong, as was the case in our previous text. No, here the defendant is that truly no-good outfit of “the nations,” “the Gentiles”—the absolutely evil arky that had regularly oppressed innocent Israel, that Israel continually had to be fighting, whose damnation and destruction Israel sought as “justice.”

The Judge knows very well that this defendant is as guilty as can be—guilty of the number one sin and ultimate injustice of trying to evade the Judge by setting up wooden idols and praying to gods that cannot save. Apparently this defendant has already taken some punishment in consequence; he is identified as the “survivors of the nations.” Even so, completely contrary to Israel’s own sense of arky justice (passages like this one just cannot be explained as creations of Israelite culture), the Judge introduces himself not simply as “Judge (righteous God)” but as the Judge who is likewise “Savior.” Who can say whether “justice” or “grace” is the more prominent theme here, when the two are, in effect, parts of one another?

But the courtroom—indubitably the place of judgment—is here presented as also being the place of grace and salvation. It is the place where not merely the “oppressed” can hope to find justice, but where the ends of the earth (including, of course, the “oppressors”) can be saved by turning to the Judge (who, we are quick to grant, was, in the same trial, also their condemner). That Judge’s final, sworn decree is that his courtroom will stay open until every knee bows in recognition of the fact that he is the Judge whose grace-justice not only can but will and has saved and justified to the uttermost.

 

 

“There’s no denying that what you’ve just shown us from Isaiah is a wonderful vision. The trouble is that it is so idealistic as to be entirely irrelevant to the real political world in which we live and in which we must do our seeking of justice. The evil, oppressing arkys against which we must contend are themselves so totally opposed to anything like ‘grace’ that, in the struggle, it would be sheer foolishness for us to try anything like a gracious approach to them. Really, it’s too bad; yet the fact of the matter is that the world is so locked into the ways of power-justice that we have no alternative. Isaiah’s will have to remain what it is, a wonderful vision.”

I disagree. The above objection actually sells God short. In rebuttal, allow me to present another “trial” story—this one under the title “The Grace of the U.S. Government.” And if the pairing of “grace” with “the wicked, oppressing arky of the U.S. government” strikes you as the height of outrage and ludicrousness—well, that only shows you need to keep reading.

Of course, what immediately must be said is that grace is the wrong word and that what I actually have in mind is “The graciousness of the U.S. Government.” As a Christian anarchist, I am under no illusion that any human arky (including the church) can so nearly approximate God as to communicate anything remotely resembling justifying, redeeming, resurrecting grace. Obviously I have in mind only the spin-off of horizontal, human-level graciousness—though we all know, even this much is rare among the arkys contending for justice. Specifically, then, my story is meant to show how the practice of true Christian Anarchy can lend an air of graciousness even to political arky confrontations normally marked by contention, accusation, and ill-will. Christian Anarchy seeks justice in a spirit entirely different from that of arky faith.

I actually have better reason than most to think very ungraciously of the U.S. Government. I’ve been under its gun. Actually, it was my son Enten rather than I personally who was under the gun, but I was standing close enough to be mighty uncomfortable. We are speaking, of course, of the government that indicted him for following his conscience in declining to register for military conscription. It then put him through a full-fledged (and highly publicized) federal trial where, before the world, he was found guilty and convicted as a felon.

I was in the courtroom as a witness for the defense and was closely informed regarding all the action outside the courtroom. I can speak for one who has been treated as an enemy of the U.S. Government. All the official papers bore the heading: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA versus ENTEN VERNARD ELLER. This was the setup for a power struggle in which all the power was on one side—and in which all the right to define and enforce justice was on one side, too. As an arky contest, this one didn’t promise to be a very fair matchup. At least with David against Goliath, the kid wasn’t pacifistically inhibited from slinging pebbles (or mud).

Let it be clear that, as I now proceed to speak of the graciousness of the U.S. Government, I am in no way legitimizing that arky as being of God, and I am in no way suggesting that it is above criticism. Shortly following the trial itself, I published an article in which I made my witness-protest, speaking to the points at which I felt the government to be dead wrong—such things as the calling of a registration that is of no practical military value; calling a registration in the absence of any perceived emergency; enacting legislation that does not recognize or make any provision for religious conscience; and, in a way completely disproportionate to much more serious crimes, making non-registration a felony punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Yet that is only half the story—and sheer honesty (quite apart from any graciousness on my part) demands that the other half be told as well.

First, it must be said that, all the way through, Enten spoke and acted toward the government in an entirely gracious manner. His non-registration was nothing other than an act of obedience to what he understood to be the will of God—and not at all the political “civil disobedience” of mounting a power protest against the wickedness of the state. He made no effort to call attention to his “just cause” or to try to make the government’s cause look bad. We are grateful that Enten was enabled to act so and thank God for making such conduct possible.

Enten knew, of course, that his Bible forbids him from going to law. So, not having perfect freedom in that matter, he did the next best thing and prohibited his attorneys from mounting, on his behalf any sort of legal challenges to the law or the actions of the government. His idea was that the trial should deal exclusively with his act of non-registration and the rationale behind it—and not be turned into contention with the state. As is quite understandable, the attorneys were not a little frustrated—and so opened their case by complaining a bit to the judge and explaining that the defenselessness of the defense would be owing entirely to Enten’s Christianity and not to any lack of adversarial will or skill on their part.

The judge (even though he went out of his way to show that it was he, and not Enten, who was running this trial) spoke of the “agony” of judging this young man, and at no point did government representatives show anything but respect and honour toward my son. At no point did the government try to strengthen its case by accusing him of malice or by trying to blacken his reputation. Now, the government knows how to do that, of course—knows how to play “adversarial put-down” just as well as the peace movement does. The government could have done that. The fact that it did not can be credited only as horizontal grace.

I think I am correct that never in the course of the entire case was Enten confronted by an armed officer of the law. He was never arrested, handcuffed, or held in any sort of custody. Such, of course, is hardly accepted procedure with accused felons. It was indeed gracious of the government to recognize that a show of force was not appropriate in Enten’s situation.

The closest thing to an officer of the law would have to have been the FBI agent in charge of the case. He was the witness for the prosecution in proving that Enten had not registered (although the trial time could have been cut in half simply by asking Enten whether he had). There were two prosecuting attorneys in the trial, both of whom had earlier interviewed Enten, politely and caringly warning him of what could happen if he continued to turn down extended offers for him to register. One of those prosecutors opened the trial by stating that the government was not in any way questioning the sincerity of Enten’s conscientious objection, the legitimacy of his religious views, the right of any group to advocate pacifism, or, in particular, the integrity of the Church of the Brethren and its position.

The other prosecutor closed the government’s case with these words:

Everyone in this courtroom by now knows that the young man has not registered, and that his decision was made over a long period of time. I gather that everyone is persuaded that his decision was made intelligently, it was made by him carefully, and it was made with a considerable amount of counseling. The government does not today, and has not, challenged the sincerity of this young man’s convictions. We do not claim or believe for one minute that the beliefs he has presented are a sham. We are persuaded he does indeed hold them.

Now, when, in any trial, the job of the prosecution is to prosecute—to put the defendant in the poorest possible light and make him out to be as guilty as it can—this sort of testimony comes through as high-level graciousness. Indeed, at some point in the proceedings, a journalist friend of Enten’s who was seated in the press section (which took up the whole of the jury box and half the gallery) overheard the veteran Associated Press correspondent whisper, “This is the strangest trial I’ve ever seen.”

The high-water mark of prosecution graciousness came in its cross-examination of the defendant. Instead of trying to score points against him, the prosecutor spent the time handing points to him. He began by expressing appreciation for the candor and openness Enten had shown all the way through and got from Enten the agreement that the prosecution had been “up front” in its turn. It was he, the prosecutor (and not the defence) who put it into the record that, even before Enten had been indicted or was under any sort of legal obligation, he had provided the prosecutors with his summer itinerary so he could be found without difficulty.

Although both in the press and from the public Enten had been accused of being a publicity seeker; it was the prosecutor (and not the defence) who revealed to the court that, early on, there had been a telephone conversation in which the defendant and the prosecution agreed that neither would seek media attention in making a public issue of the case. He then volunteered that Enten had fulfilled that pledge and received Enten’s confirmation that the government had, too. Here, I suggest, the government was recognizing an all-important distinction between Enten’s Christian Anarchy and the holy-arky “civil disobedience” with which it must regularly contend. The arky effort needs media coverage as the empowerment of its challenge to government wickedness; Enten wasn’t challenging anyone, so neither needed nor wanted any help from the media.

Then, the judge—as much a representative of the U.S. Government as anyone else—interrupted with a comment indicating that he saw the case as I was interpreting it, as having nothing to do with how good or bad Enten might be, but as a conflict between religion and the law.

Later, in the process of supposedly “examining” Enten, the judge got turned around actually to initiate an argument and help the defendant formulate it, namely, that Enten didn’t even have an opinion as to whether God willed anyone else to join him in not registering, and that, in effect, he was not representing any power bloc and wanted no part of any. Here again, as I understand it, the government was pushing a second all-important distinction. “Civil disobedience,” of course, is eager to recruit participants and amass supporters as a show of power. Yet, not even being in a power game, Christian Anarchy says only, “I must be obedient to what God wants from me—quite apart from what anyone else thinks or does.”

In the formal announcement of his conclusions, the judge—as a finding of fact—said this: “I find further that, as of this time, he cannot conscientiously register with the Selective Service System.” Of course, Enten had been catching all sorts of flak about being unpatriotic, a traitor to his country, and whatever. It may have been with this in mind, then, that, during the sentencing, the judge made a point of saying: “It seems to the court that this is a classic clash between your religious beliefs and the law of the land. I’m sure you love your country. I’m positive of that fact. I’m sure you love the people of this country.” And his final words in the courtroom that day were these: “I think the defences you have raised—or the defences you haven’t raised and so forth—have made you certainly an honourable person within the eyes of this court. And I think that your appearance here underscores that.”

There is more graciousness in the trial that could be reported. But when the person customarily addressed as “Your Honour” in effect bestows that title also upon the defendant he has just found guilty, that is grace (or at least a high level of human graciousness). There is nothing requiring a judge to undercut his own verdict by explaining it away, saying in effect: “I have to find you guilty of a felony, Enten; but I am ready to say loud and clear that I don’t consider you a felon in any sense of the word.” You tell me whether, in that trial, Enten was convicted or acquitted.

In his decree, the judge set as one of the terms of Enten’s probation that, within ninety days, he must “comply with the registration requirements.” But as Enten’s time for compliance was running out, the judge leaked to Enten that it was 99 percent certain he would go to prison. When Enten still did not comply, the judge simply changed the terms to two years of public service work. In a press interview given on that occasion, he was quoted as saying: “I wasn’t going to give him a prison sentence. He’s just different. He’s a very special person.”

Then, just as Enten was getting started on his work project in Virginia, his sister was to be married in California and wanted him as a member of the wedding. He arranged with his employer for an absolute minimum of leave, missing only a Thursday and Friday at work. When Enten applied to his probation officer for legal permission to make the trip, Mike said, “Well, if you’re going so far, why don’t you stay longer?” You can be sure Enten took him up on his graciousness; he was home for a full week.

At one point in his trial my son thanked the judge for the “ease” he had felt in the courtroom. Rather than “ease,” he could well have said “freedom.” Enten found freedom in the very process of being convicted—praise the Lord! But wonder of wonders, if that old arky of the U.S. Government (which, always remember, likewise consists of human individuals, just as much as Enten does) didn’t experience some rather impressive freeing-up of its own—praise the Lord!

There was found the freedom for every person in that courtroom to be treated with the dignity and respect (and, yes, even love) due human individuals. There was found freedom from the necessity of conducting the trial as the arky contest: The United States of America versus Enten Vernard Eller. (As Enten told the press, the question as to who had won didn’t make sense, because there hadn’t been a fight.) There was found the freedom of the government to drop all the niceties of legal protocol (“the strangest trial I’ve ever seen”) and play it simply as a group of concerned individuals addressing a common problem. There was found the freedom for the court to arrive at a conviction without creating wrath anywhere.

There was found grace. There was found freedom. And there was found justice—justice of a quality that the defendant could say to the judge: “I want to assure you that I would not condemn you if you were to convict me.... That is a choice that you have to make; and I admit that I am comfortable with you making it, because of what I have heard of you. And it is said that you are a just man. So I rest secure that, whether I am convicted or acquitted, you believe that justice has been served. And I’m comfortable with that.”

All this, bear in mind, took its start from an anarchical action of refusing to obey the Big Arky’s law. Nothing was found here that represents a legitimizing of the state, a recognizing of holy obligation toward it, any suggestion that it is above criticism. As I said, I even took the occasion to publish an article—done, I hope, in the rational persuasions of speaking the truth in love—which was my witness and protest against the evils and injustices of the draft registration law.

So, finding grace, freedom, and justice here manifest within the arky workings of the U.S. Government does in no way indicate that it is, in fact, a holy arky elect of God. Yet neither is there any counter-indication, that it is a demonic arky elect of Satan. No, all the indications are that it is simply a human arky—sometimes good, sometimes bad, and most times in-between (even as you and I—and probably in about the same proportions). Yet, even as in us God can sometimes find a crack in the wall through which to introduce a bit of grace that frees us to be gracious (and even loving) toward that arky—so can he sometimes find a crack through which to make it gracious in response.

Granted, Enten’s U.S. Government trial and Isaiah’s Judge Jehovah trial are not at all the same thing—yet they aren’t totally dissimilar, either. My explanation of the similarity is not that the U.S. Government is like God, but that, ultimately, it was the same Judge conducting both trials—praise the Lord!

It is, of course, the presence in the trial of “human graciousness” that we have been arguing—and not necessarily that of the divine grace of God himself. Yet, at the same time, I certainly don’t want to be guilty of denying that latter possibility. My reluctance is explained by the hesitation I feel around those who are so quick and self-confident in identifying what are manifestations of God’s grace and what not (we humans are no more infallible in that regard than in any other). Yet in the trial, it must be said, God’s grace was given every opportunity. Enten and all of those with him had a prayer meeting on the steps of the Federal Building before going in. When we got in, word came from the judge that he would be a little late. Enten’s attorney (who knows the judge well) said, “He’s probably in prayer with his pastor.” I have reason to believe that considerable silent praying went on right in the courtroom itself (that’s not unconstitutional, is it?). Granted, in Enten’s trial we didn’t do too good a job at maintaining our vaunted “separation of church and state”—but the point is that, although “human graciousness” is no proof, it can be a direct product of “God’s grace.”

Well then, we have portrayed justice, freedom, and grace as fruits of Christian Anarchy. Recently, two events coincided in time to impress me with the arky-faith equivalents. The first was the Republican Convention with its disgusting rush of conservative, evangelical Christians falling over one another to declare the Reagan Administration as holy government in holy tandem with holy church. Yet that is sheerly the zealotism of foot-kissing, collaborationist legitimizing, with nothing of true Christian justice, freedom, or grace to be found in it or expected from it. For sure, the U.S. Government isn’t that good—or the church, either, if it comes to that.

About the same time, there appeared an issue of Sojourners, a magazine of radical discipleship, with this headline on the cover, in large, coloured, block lettering: “RONALD REAGAN IS LYING ABOUT NICARAGUA. IF THE U.S. INVADES NICARAGUA thousands of U.S. citizens are promising massive public resistance.”

If that is discipleship, it is the following of a different Lord from the one I ever heard speak; it represents a type of offense-causing entirely different from his. This is nothing other than the turned-up volume of zealotism and revolutionist class warfare with nothing of true Christian justice, freedom, and grace about it or to be expected from it. For sure, the U.S. Government isn’t that bad, either—so bad that it now becomes “speaking the truth in love” to accuse and damn it for sins not yet committed.

It’s enough to make one grateful to be a Christian anarchist, free to give God what belongs to God rather than having to choose between the holy-arky alternatives.