Civilization and Violence

 Friends, 

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by John Dominic Crossan entitled, God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now. I don’t think I’ll ever finish it because I keep going back and re-reading the first part. Crossan describes some of the extremely remote sites that served as refuges for hermits once upon a time. Many ancient hermitages were communal, and some are almost impossible to reach, by boat or by land. They may be a set of rooms impossibly hewn out of out of cropping stones or set in a part of the desert that lacks the water and shade that settled habitation requires. The reason for the remote locations was to create communities that did not have the trappings of what we often think of as civilization. 

Crossan notes that we can speak of “civilization” to name things that are lovely about human life – art, architecture, music, and the like. Crossan is using the term in the way that Walter Benjamin does in the chapter’s epigraph, “There is no documentation of civilization which is not at the same time a documentation of barbarism.” So, for example, Crossan says these remote hermitages were not technically monasteries or convents, because those terms describe gender separation – monasteries for monks/men; convents for nuns/women – and separation is often grounded in inequity (think of the problems with “separate, but equal”). These early hermitages were highly egalitarian. They did not claim ownership or condone servitude, but declared all things common, and would respond to violence with nonviolence even if it meant death. 

Crossan says the goal of these remote communities was to live apart from the violence of civilization that many of us have come to believe is inherently part of human life. With a nod to the original meaning of the word paradox, Crossan notes that these hermitages lived “against the opinion” of what community must look like. They were testimonies that life does not have to be built on violence demonstrated through competition that enriches some and impoverishes others, or exploitative practices from slavery to colonialism to racism to sexism to depriving farm workers just wages. Violence-based civilization is precisely the kind of “empire” that the “Reign of God” overturns. There, the last become first; sinners and prostitutes are welcomed as table mates; the poor are blessed while the rich find their journey as impossible a threading the eye of a needle; and so forth. Salvation, then, becomes both a liberation and a path of discipleship, freedom from theologies of domination and education into what holds true value. The first lesson is, to quote Crossan again, “the normalcy of civilization’s violence is not the inevitability of humanity’s destiny.” We. Can. Change. Even if it does not seem to be in us, it is in God to change that which seems unchangeable. 

As we continue to lean into “The Phoenix Affirmations,” we have declared so far that we worship God made known in Christ while not denying that God can be present in other religious expressions; and that we listen for God’s Word through prayer and meditation, Scripture, and discerning what God is doing in the world. We are aspiring to be a church that sounds contrary to what many people think when they hear “church.” In that sense, we are embracing a paradox (“against the opinion”) of faithfulness. It is a process of unlearning and relearning for all of us. I’m so glad we are on this journey together.

Mark of St. Mark