Scripture and Resistance (Theology in the Age of Empire) 1978703570, 9781978703575

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Scripture and Resistance

Praise for Scripture and Resistance Scripture and Resistance continues the paradigm shift in the self-understanding of Biblical Studies by bringing to bear the theoretical perspectives of the margins on the hegemonic center. An international group of scholars explores the Bible as a site of struggle in these Neo-liberal times. I highly recommend this excellent work! Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza Krister Stendahl Professor, Harvard University Divinity School In this provocative collection of essays, interpreters of diverse backgrounds and perspectives explore how the Bible has been used mainly to support—but sometimes to subvert—empire. Although voices of resistance were submerged in biblical texts, many of those texts portray a continuing struggle between people and imperial subjugation and exploitation. But Bible-bearing colonialists, with the collusion of established biblical studies, claimed authority to invade people’s lives and to expropriate their lands. These essays call for a more honest acknowledgment of the Bible’s (and biblical studies’) historic and contemporary role in empire, and a more candid reading of the ambiguity, at best, of scriptural texts. Richard Horsley Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion, University of Massachusetts Boston (emeritus) While the biblical scriptures have so often been marshalled to justify forms of dispossession, colonialism, and imperialism, these same scriptures continue to provide the inspiration for resistance to, if not the overthrow of, such oppression. The insights expertly gathered in Scripture and Resistance, from many parts of the globe that have experienced colonial dispossession in the not too distant past, indicate clearly that the Bible is not always a solace to the peddlers of empire. Roland Boer professor, University of Newcastle

Theology in the Age of Empire Series Editor: Jione Havea In these five volumes, an international collective of theologians interrogate Christianity’s involvement with empires past and present, trouble its normative teachings and practices whenever they sustain and profit from empire, and rekindle the insights and energies within the Christian movement that militate against empire’s rapacity. Titles in the Series Scripture and Resistance Religion and Power Forthcoming People and Land Vulnerability and Resilience Mission and Context

Scripture and Resistance Edited by Jione Havea Foreword by Collin Cowan

LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Havea, Jione, 1965- editor. Title: Scripture and resistance / edited by Jione Havea ; foreword by Collin Cowan. Description: Lanham : Fortress Academic, 2019. | Series: Theology in the age of empire | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019005492 (print) | LCCN 2019010693 (ebook) | ISBN 9781978703582 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781978703575 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Politics in the Bible. | Christianity and politics—Biblical teaching. | Power (Christian theology)—Biblical teaching. | Bible—Postcolonial criticism. | Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc. Classification: LCC BS680.P45 (ebook) | LCC BS680.P45 S37 2019 (print) | DDC 220.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005492 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

This book was made possible through the kind contribution of the Council for World Mission

Contents

Foreword Collin Cowan

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Preface

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1 Negotiating with Scripture and Resistance Jione Havea DARE TO REREAD 2 Ephphatha! DARE to Be Opened!: Scripture, Its Civil War, and Shakenness Graham J. Adams 3 The People against the Empire: Biblical Understandings Néstor O. Míguez 4 The Text Collectors: White Dutch Biblical Appropriation Janneke Stegeman 5 Gemma Augustea, Imperial Paradox, and the Matthean Resistance Raj Nadella 6 Cornelius the Centurion Meets the Ethiopian Eunuch in a Jeepney Revelation Enriques Velunta 7 The Oppressor Has Ceased Rogelio Dario Barolin

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DARE TO RESIST 8 A Decolonial Reading of Ephesians: For Resisting the Postcolonial Empire Jin Young Choi 9 Using the Bible to Resist Empire in the Caribbean’s Jamaica Stephen C. A. Jennings 10 “Love Your Neighbor as Yourself”: A Call to Resist and Transform Economic Empire Cynthia Moe-Lobeda 11 The Bible: Globalized Commodity in the New Strategies of Neocolonialism Nancy Cardoso Pereira 12 Scripture as a Site of Struggle: Literary and Sociohistorical Resources for Prophetic Theology in Postcolonial, Postapartheid (Neocolonial?) South Africa Gerald O. West 13 Views, Voices, and Choices: Reading Readers of Luke-Acts and Empire Tat-siong Benny Liew

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Foreword Collin Cowan

This collection of chapters is one of the first fruits of the Discernment and Radical Engagement (DARE) program of the Council for World Mission (CWM). In a time when imperial powers exploit, divide, despoil, and threaten our world, CWM offers the DARE program as a voice of counter-imperial consciousness. CWM is an international mission organization that has wrestled, since the 1970s, with how to decolonize mission—its theory, theology, and praxis—and how to proclaim fullness of life at a time when all of life is threatened. CWM, through DARE, clarifies its prophetic role in the present political and social landscapes and in allegiance to the God of life who, according to the prophet Mary, brings down the mighty from their thrones. Empire is always anxious to silence the prophets who dare to confront power, challenge status quo, and call for justice. DARE brings together many of these prophets, as you will see in these pages, and gives them a platform. Elijah did not set out to be a troublemaker but to speak truth to power. Amos did not aim to be a trouble rouser but to challenge the systems of injustice and to call for a more equitable socioeconomic arrangement. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah defied the order of the king of Egypt, not because they did not fear him, but because they feared God and honored life more. Jesus himself was crucified on claims of being a traitor, but his intent was to gather and move people to the way of life. Peter and his colleagues were concerned about testifying to the resurrection of Jesus rather than to disturb the prized and protected sanctuaries of the Sanhedrin council. Through DARE, as discernment and radical engagement, CWM partners with the prophets of our time, sending a clear signal, to ourselves and to the world, that our loyalty is to the God of life, who calls us to take on the lifegiving mission for which Jesus lived and died. DARE declares that we are on the side of the radical, communitarian Jesus who dared to name “thieves and xi

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robbers” as the destroyers of life and presented himself as God’s mediator and messenger of life in fullness—an alternative to the eternal Rome of his time. If people become uncomfortable because we proclaim this message of life, so be it; but let it be said that CWM is committed to offering an alternative way of looking at the current social order, and to promote the good news of Shalom and justice. If people become disturbed by that message then I would regard that as part of the impact of the message, and there is nothing to fear. It is then that we join Peter and John in their question to the Sanhedrin: “Which is right in God’s eyes: to listen to you or Jesus?” The contributors, in different ways, reclaim the prophetic calling Jesus places on our lives to be agitators of a new epistemology, rooted in an understanding of God’s love for the world that is relentless in making all things new. There is evil, despair, and injustice in our world, but this work and CWM’s witness is all about defying this reality with hope. Hope that is audacious and daring like these texts and the further work CWM’s DARE program will bring to fruition. Collin Cowan General Secretary, CWM April 13, 2018

Preface

The chapters are arranged to convey the idea that, in the age of empires, the Bible is open for rereading (part 1) and resisting (part 2). To be more daring, the Bible’s place in the missions of empires makes rereading and resisting it necessary. Rereading and resisting are thoroughly interesting, and the authors do not shy away from taking a stand against canonical, historical, and modern imperial powers. As a “site of struggle” (see chapter by Gerald O. West), the Bible is open for interpretation—this is the key conviction behind these chapters. The Bible is a site of struggle between empires and people (see chapters by Néstor Míguez, Raj Nadella, Rogelio Dario Barolin, and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda); between cosmic and local concerns (see chapters by Revelation Enriquez Velunta, Jin Young Choi, and Nancy Cardoso Pereira); between different modes of biblical scholarship—especially between traditional white scholarship that pretends to be universal (see chapter by Janneke Stegeman) and local context-critical scholarship (see chapter by Stephen C. A. Jennings); and between concepts of truth (see chapter by Graham Adams). On the topic of resistance, the collection affirms that the Bible is open, and it needs to be kept open (see chapters by Graham Adams and Tat-siong Benny Liew). In other words, the Bible has not been nailed down. The chapters may of course be read in different orders, and still convey the idea that the Bible is a site of struggle. This is to say that readers of this collection need not follow the flow of the book but may scan the range of subjects for whatever tickles their readerly fancies. For that end, a brief (albeit reductionistic) framing of each chapter is offered (in the alphabetical order of author’s surname), in the welcoming spirit of rereading and resisting: Graham J. Adams argues that religion suffers from “unatonement,” and it distorts the truth to serve the interests of empire. So there is a “civil war” xiii

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between two truths: “truth-as-openness” is open to reality, whereas “truth-ascorrectness” reduces truth to loyalty to certain interests. Drawing on “Ephphatha!” (Mark 7)—“Be opened!”—Adams presents Jesus as the shaken one who fosters solidarity among all sorts of people in defiance of empire. Rogelio Dario Barolin offers two biblical plus one Uruguayan ways to face the pain and suffering brought by empires: lamenting allows the voices of the oppressed to be heard; parodying is a way to resist the empire’s pretension of eternity; and the Uruguayan experience of “Murga,” a concrete artistic expression of resistance to military dictatorship, is a contemporary example of the present relevance of lamentation and parody. Nancy Cardoso Pereira reflects on the advances of globalized capitalism. Whereas missionary agencies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had the Bible as a book of study and devotion, in neocolonial Christianity the Bible is merchandise that moves billions of dollars. Because the global advance of fundamentalist Christianity stops people from reading the Bible, Cardoso Pereira suggests that liberating reading of the Bible must be radicalized. Jin Young Choi rereads Ephesians by examining: (1) how Paul’s apocalyptic gospel of the cross changes into a theology of the cosmic Christ in Ephesians; (2) how such a theology mimics the imperial logic; and (3) how the author of Ephesians seeks to extend the dominating imperial ideology of unity and peace, building an alternative social body. With Ephesians, Choi invites reflection on the ways today’s church imagines its global identity and future. Jione Havea reflects on the intersecting dynamics of text, land, and native bodies, taking Palestine and Pasifika as grounds for rereading and resisting the Bible. As biblical texts and teachings were used to push away and even kill native people, thus vacating their homes for the Bible-bearing colonialists, so may biblical texts and teachings be reread in negotiation. In other words, the Bible is open for negotiating readers. Stephen C. A. Jennings shows how Scripture has been used to support and to subvert empires in the context of Jamaica. Tracing hermeneutics that promoted and resisted racism, slavery, genderism, classism, and (neo)colonialism, Jennings calls for a review of the applications of Scripture to the Jamaican context. He concludes with suggestions on how these insights on and of Scripture can be utilized to engage empires in Jamaica and beyond. Tat-siong Benny Liew shows that there is no one single unified biblical view or perspective about empire and resistance. Presenting various readings of Luke-Acts, Liew emphasizes less the “true” biblical views or voices about empire and resistance, but more the choices that people make to legitimize their political desires and ethical inclinations with the Bible, which is not only diverse in its content but also ambiguous as a text.

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Néstor O. Míguez proposes that the Bible is the struggle between two entities—empire and people. With a brief view over Old and New Testament texts that witness to that struggle, Míguez finds history as the intervention of God renewing its promise to constitute a people able to live in plenitude and diversity, with the understanding that creation is the place for “good living.” Cynthia Moe-Lobeda resists imperial systems that cause brutal suffering. Livelihoods are destroyed, minds colonized, wars incited, earth’s life systems endangered, and people forced into poverty or slavery. Jesus’s call to “love thy neighbor” is empowering, striving for justice in the context of empire. Justice-seeking neighbor-love seeks economic, racial, and gender equity, the well-being of vulnerable people, and the health of earth. Raj Nadella explicates Herod’s birthday banquet (Matt 14:1–12) as a metaphor that characterizes the paradoxical political and economic structures of the first-century Roman Empire (evident in Gemma Augustea). The feeding of the five thousand (Matt 14:13–21) in the desert, a banquet for the marginalized, offers an alternative to the empire’s economic practices and policies. Janneke Stegeman discusses connections between Dutch protestant appropriation of biblical texts and the illusion of Jewish-Christian superior culture. Stegeman’s question is inviting: How might the hidden whiteness in Dutch culture and its attitudes toward the Bible be challenged? Such whiteness needs to be uncovered, provincialized, and contextualized; stripped of its innocence and the entitlement by which it speaks and positions itself. Revelation Enriques Velunta rereads Luke’s ideology that an imperial soldier is an appropriate Christian model—converting high officers (e.g., Cornelius) was a step toward establishing a Christian empire. Luke-Acts, in other words, is like a military jeep (imperial text). In the Philippines, on the contrary, US military jeeps are converted into public utility jeepneys. On a jeepney reading, Cornelius meets the black and queer Ethiopian eunuch. Gerald O. West reiterates Itumeleng Mosala’s argument that the Bible was in and of itself a site of struggle. Mosala warned that unless prophetic sectors of society recovered the contending voices within Scripture, the dominant voices within the Bible would be co-opted by the dominant forces within society. West uses the shape of Judges-(Ruth)–1 Samuel as a site of struggle from which to garner counter ideological methodological resources. Some readers may resist the flow of this book and track alternative streams through the following pages. All are welcome to dare to reread and to resist.

Chapter One

Negotiating with Scripture and Resistance Jione Havea

Hangē ha kapa kuka (Tongan proverb that translates as “like a can/tin containing live crabs”) is appropriate for Scripture. Scripture is lively. Busy. Feisty. Noisy. For readers who are crab-sensitive or water-oriented, many of whom may not be coastal or saltwater people, (the noise of) Scripture is also rhythmic. Scripture says a lot. Actually, Scripture (as text) does not say anything without the expounding of and exchange between readers. Readers make Scripture say some things, and not say other things. Readers sometimes ignore and sometimes (un)consciously silence some of the scriptural sayings that undermine their own agendas. Scripture (as text) is only one piece of the puzzle; ways of reading (see any of the chapters in this collection), readers (or “text collectors,” see the chapter by Janneke Stegeman) and readings (all of which are situated and contextual) play significant roles in determining and shaping what Scripture says (or not). 1 Scripture means a lot too, both in terms of its abundance of meanings as well as its significance to people (some of whom may not be regular or committed readers). Scripture does things to people for, to borrow the words of American philosopher George Yancy, it contains “words [that] do things.” 2 A lot of things. Scripture makes people live, think, grow, review, love, hate, age and die. It teases people’s imaginations and influences the decisions that they make, and the paths that they take. Or avoid. Scripture sometimes clouds the obvious and lulls questioning minds. It sometimes reveals and sometimes conceals realities, it sometimes establishes and sometimes resists what it says, and it sometimes opens and sometimes closes minds. And sometimes, Scripture does more than what it says. In other 1

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words, Scripture is both affective as well as unfolding. Revolving. Ongoing. Unresolved. Scripture informs as well as cuts, for some of its words are “s/words.” 3 It even makes the unseen visible, and the absurd believable. NATIVE READING What Scripture (qua text) says and does that result in robbing people of meaningful life and land (by “land collectors”) lurk behind my reflections in this opening chapter. It is painful for me when a Scripture that recognizes and respects the presence of “people of the land” also demands, authorizes, and justifies another people to invade and seize that land. The Scripture that pains me the most in this connection is the Bible, mainly because i 4 am a native who works in and for a church—the keeper of the Bible and the minder of biblical interpretation in Pasifika (for Oceania, Pacific Islands) and many parts of the global south. I highlight my native-hood not in order to put up a hand for nativism, which preaches that only natives should speak for natives, but in solidarity with natives who are wronged, robbed, or slain because of what the Bible says and does (see any of the chapters that follow). I claim native-hood in solidarity rather than as an epistemological excuse, and i reject missionary and scholarly positions that romanticize (e.g., natives are naïve sexual objects) and demonize (e.g., natives are savages) native people. 5 I identify myself as a native with pride, and i reflect and write as if i was a “bone collector” who is obliged to resist interpretations and “text collectors” (interpreters) who support “land collectors” (colonialists, past and present—see chapters by Cynthia Moe-Lobeda and Nancy Cardoso Pereira for recent forms of colonization) in Pasifika and beyond. Claiming native-hood makes me belong, but that does not make me indigenous. Nativity (which has to do with birth) is not to be confused with indigeneity (which has to do with origin). This is a comforting distinction for me to make, for i belong to a people who assert that “our ancestors were navigators.” 6 This assertion could be read in two ways. First, it affirms that the origin of our ancestors was not at the island that became their home. Our ancestors came from somewhere else to occupy the island group where our people were born, and as a consequence we became its natives. We have legends that name our ancestors’ homeland (e.g., Hawaiki, Rangitea, Tawhiti), but no one knows where that was or if it was a physical place. Nonetheless, the homeland of our ancestors was real enough to be legendary. Second, the assertion affirms that our ancestors were skilled navigators who crossed the open seas of Pasifika and reached the Americas long before Europeans, and we do not need DNA proofs to make those legends convincing. 7 The two understandings of the assertion (“our ancestors were navigators”) comple-

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ment each other, and recognize that our ancestors were the first people to occupy and settle our home(is)lands (compare to the Africans who were taken by force to the Americas; see the chapter by Stephen C. A. Jennings). Our ancestors did not write Scriptures, but they generated legends that explain and justify their occupation of our home(is)lands. Those legends are “myths of belonging” (rather than “myths of origin”). Myths of belonging made our ancestors belong but did not give them excuses to claim originality or exclusive rights; myths of belonging are bases for taking roots and for feeling at home, but they do not give anyone the right to displace or to exclude. Myths of belonging are native “texts” (such as the proverb that opened this chapter) that circulate with the gifts of orality, and our appreciation of orality is similar to that of Indigenous Australians for whom “Aboriginal history has been handed down in ways of stories, dances, myths and legends. The dreaming is history.” 8 The Bible on the other hand is written Scripture, 9 and thus endowed with the dynamics of textuality. Because my focus in this chapter is on the Bible (as Scripture), i frame my attempt at negotiating through a native reading (so i too am a text collector, but of native stock) that favors the land of Canaan. LAND With respect to land occupation, one of the formative biblical texts is Genesis 12. It starts with the call of Abram (12:1–4a), his departure with his family from Haran and arrival into the land of Canaan (12:4b–6), his receiving of the LORD’s announcement that the gifted land was for his yet to be born offspring (12:7), and ends with Abram leaving Canaan, moving toward the Negeb (12:8–9) and into Egypt (12:10–20). This text (esp. 12:1–7) has functioned for Abram’s offspring as a myth of belonging in the land of Canaan (Palestine). The land was a gift promised by the LORD, reached by Abram, and then certified by the LORD. This is a key text for past and present “land collectors” in Canaan-Palestine, and countless “text collectors” have added their weight on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Those interpretations are in oral and written forms, and so the Bible continues to (be made to) say and do a lot. There are, however, details in Gen 12 that text collectors often overlook, but these are critical in my native reading. Depending on which side of the Israel-Palestine conflict one stands, these details could be invitations or excuses for denouncing resistance and negotiation. Native Canaanites The first detail is the short sentence at the end of Gen 12:6, “At that time the Canaanites were in the land.” When Abram and his cohort arrived, the land

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was not empty; the LORD gifted a land that was already settled, and the narrative remembers and names the (first?) people who dwelled in Canaan— the Canaanites. 10 So Canaan was not terra nullius (“no one’s land”), as the British settlers wrongly claimed concerning Australia (see the chapter by Mark G. Brett). 11 That Canaan was home to the Canaanites before Abram is not hidden history or part of a hidden transcript. Rather, this is part of biblical memory, but it is not always acknowledged, respected, or foregrounded by land and text collectors. Biblical memory affirms that Canaan was home to the Canaanites before Joshua and his people arrived to spy and to negotiate (with Rahab) for the land, and even before Moses and his people departed Egypt as Abraham B. Yehoshua allows: “According to the biblical myth— the formative myth in the Jewish national consciousness, both religious and secular—the Israeli-Jewish national identity was not generated and did not spring up naturally in its homeland, the Land of Israel, but in Egyptian exile.” 12 Yehoshua stresses that the nationalist attachment of Israeli-Jewish people to “the Land of Israel” originated outside of the land; what pains my native reading is how Israeli-Jewish nationalism (whether religious or secular, Zionist or otherwise) ignores that people of the land were already in Canaan when their ancestor Abram arrived. I again emphasize that this is embedded in biblical memory, in Gen 12:6b. The narrator assumes that the LORD had the right to give away the home(land) of the Canaanites, and land collectors sneak along with the narrator. But there is no reference in Gen 12, or in the previous chapters, that connects the LORD to Canaan. Canaan had its host of deities, but the LORD was not among the chief ones (Baal, Asherah, Ashtoreth). Despite traces of Canaanite influences in Yhwh-worship, 13 the antagonism in the Bible against Canaanite religious systems suggests that the LORD did not have sovereignty over Canaan. This means, in my native reading, that the LORD gifted stolen land to Abram. There are political motivations for the lack of critical engagement with the element of biblical memory in Gen 12:6b, owing largely to the IsraelPalestine conflict. Readers who are biased, for different reasons, toward the interests of Israel tend to confuse biblical Israel with the modern State of Israel and thus read over textual details (such as Gen 12:6b) that give other people the right over the land of Canaan (Palestine). Thankfully, lack of engagement does not erase this early confirmation in biblical memory—“At that time the Canaanites were in the land” (Gen 12:6b). This element remains as a thorn in the side of (esp. religious) Israeli-Jewish nationalism. A related element in biblical memory that is often ignored is the admission in Gen 11:27–32 that Abram was one of the descendants of Terah, a native of Ur of Chaldea. Three “text collector’s items” contribute to ignoring this admission. First, the popular division of the book of Genesis into primeval stories (Gen 1–11) and patriarchal histories (Gen 12–50) discourage read-

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ers from considering the post-deluge Gen 11 as having any significance for understanding the history of the LORD’s elected people, which begins in Gen 12. The primeval stories were not to be mixed with the patriarchal histories, for Gen 11 does not flow into Gen 12. In my native reading (see further on “talanoa” below), on the other hand, Gen 11:27–32 is a critical reminder that Abram was a foreigner to Canaan, similar to the pākehā (Europeans) who have settled in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this regard, the land was stolen and gifted to the biblical version of pākehā. Second, the “short historical credo” in Deut 26:5 (“My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down to Egypt”) is privileged by giants in biblical scholarship like Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth, and their students, 14 which locates the origin of the people of Israel in Aram (modern day Syria). This credo affirms the location of Abram’s point of departure in Gen 12:5 (Haran is in Aram), but ignores his roots in Chaldea (according to Gen 11). Third, the location of Chaldea in Babylonia (modern day Iraq) was theologically and ideologically problematic for pro-Israel readers because it means that Abram was an offspring of Babylonia (which is narratively linked to the condemned Babel in Gen 11). This association is deeply insulting for Israeli-Jewish people. But it is not a problem in Rastafarian circles, where “chanting down Babylon’s shitstem” is sung with pride. 15 Thankfully, lack of engagement with Gen 11:27–32 does not erase this early element from biblical memory—Abram was the grandson of Haran whose “land of his birth . . . [was] Ur of the Chaldeans” (Gen 11:28). Abram was not indigenous to nor was he a native of Canaan. He emigrated from Haran, but his roots go back to Babylonia. With Abram’s settlement in Canaan and the birth of his offspring there, his descendants grew up as Canaanites. Similar to contemporary migrants who are born in a foreign land outside of their native homeland, the descendants of Abram are Canaan-born Aramean-Babylonians. All of these markers are scripturalized in biblical memory, at the intersection of Gen 11 with Gen 12. Gifted Land The second detail of interest for my native reading is in the LORD’s presentation of the gift to Abram, “Then the LORD appeared to Abram, and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land’” (Gen 12:7a). The gifted land was not meant for Abram’s nephew Lot, who migrated with Abram and had a chance to claim the land (Gen 13:8–12), or for Eliezer of Damascus (Gen 15:2), but for Abram’s own “seed” (“offspring” in NRSV). Two other details undermine this assignment: first, offspring was not promised in Gen 12:1–4a, and second, Sarai was barren (Gen 11:30). The LORD assigned the gift but did not explain how or offer (in Gen 12) to help Abram bring forth that offspring. So

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it took a while for Abram’s seed to spring. As the narrative unfolds, Abram “went into Hagar” (read: planted his seed) and she conceived (Gen 16:4) and bore a son whom Abram named Ishmael (Gen 16:15). Ishmael was the first offspring of Abram, but the gifted land was not meant for him either. Then the narrative turns. The LORD changed Abram’s name to Abraham (Gen 17:6) and changed Sarai’s name to Sarah (Gen 17:15), then declared that Isaac (expected to be born the following year) is the chosen offspring for the covenant (Gen 17:21). Ishmael is nonetheless circumcised (received the cut of the covenant) together with Abraham and all the men (many of whom he acquired, bought—therefore, slaves—before reaching Canaan) in his house, including “slaves born in the house and those bought with money from a foreigner” (Gen 17:26–27). These men too are covenanted, but the yet to spring up Isaac is the seed/offspring whom the LORD favored. In the shadow of the first textual detail discussed above, the gifted land is to be “stolen” from Ishmael the firstborn and first-covenanted offspring and be given to Isaac (for whom seed was yet to be planted). The s/words of the text cuts Ishmael from being an inheriting offspring of Abraham. This is injustice in native Pasifika minds, for whom blood runs deeper than the cuts of s/words. I am thus moved to be in solidarity with Ishmael, rather than celebrate the privileging of Isaac. Land, seed/offspring and covenant overlap, with some rasping, in this second textual detail. Being an offspring did not mean that Ishmael will receive a share of the stolen land promised for the offspring of Abram; receiving the cut of the covenant did not set the offspring apart from the slaves; and to receive the LORD’s gifted land was not based on birthright or covenant keeping. These are chafing features in this textual detail. The two textual details discussed here, the first functioning as a reminder of the robbed native people of Canaan and the second functioning as a reminder of the robbed first offspring of Abram, present the gift promised by the LORD (to use a liquid imagery) as a “bitter drink” (cf. Exod 15:23, Num 5:23–28). And by extension, both “biblical Israel” and “modern Israel,” in their appropriation of the gift promised to Abram, lay claim to a poisoned and poisoning well. 16 Roaming Patriarch The third detail of interest in Gen 12 is Abram’s roaming. The narrative gives the impression that he was in perpetual movement. He began to roam soon after he arrived (in Gen 12:5b): He “passed through the land” to the Oak of Moreh (Gen 12:6a) where he built an altar to the LORD (Gen 12:7), moved to the hill country where he built another altar (12:8), then moved “by stages toward the Negeb” (Gen 12:9) and into Egypt when the famine became severe in the land (Gen 12:10–16). The length of time between each move is

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not given but after four verses of arriving into Canaan, Abram and his family exited the gifted land. Building his first altar (Gen 12:7b) comes across as his acknowledgment of the LORD’s gift, but his roaming suggests that he did not want to keep it. So one might rightly ask, was Abram running away from the LORD’s gift? Was he a patriarchal prefigure for Jonah, a prophetic runagate? Or for Job, another biblical slave owner whom text collectors agree was righteous and blameless? How could a slave owner be blameless? One thing is for sure, the so-called promised land was not flowing with milk and honey when Abram and his family exited. Abram’s roaming predates the voyages of European (pākehā) land collectors who raised flags and left markers to “register” the land that they claimed to have “discovered” for their crown. And as they moved from place to place, they claimed more land and increased their wealth (cf. Gen 12:5, 12:16). When Abram built his second altar (Gen 12:8), he marked a new piece of land to add to the land with which the LORD gifted him. This wealthy roaming migrant thus looks like a colonialist in a patriarch’s outfit. A similar case of land grabbing in modern time is the expansion of the modern State of Israel with its segregation walls and its settlements creeping into the lands of Palestine (see figure 1.1). The territories of Palestine have continually and rapidly been snatched and fragmented since the UN partition

Figure 1.1. Palestinian Loss of Land 1946–2010. Source: Maps posted by the Palestinian National Council at www.palestinepnc.org; reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

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on 29 November 1947. 17 And the recent move of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (West Bank) on 14 May 2018, the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the modern State of Israel, adds fuel to the fire in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The United States privileges Israel, and ignores the textual details discussed above. The modern State of Israel bases its claim over the land (biblical Canaan) with a narrative that rejects both the natives (of Canaan) and the firstborn (of Abram). The Bible (as Scripture) says and does a lot, with the aid of text collectors who ignore and silence details that do not support their cause (see the chapter by Tat-siong Benny Liew). In the case of modern Palestine, land collectors are aided by text collectors who ignore details such as those discussed above. Those details remain in the text as inspiration for resistance against text and land collectors who ignore the first people of Canaan and the injustice committed against Abram’s first offspring. Within the same text that warrants and justifies the Israeli narrative of dispossession are details that resist that narrative. This insight applies to the Bible as a whole, and so the challenge is to reread (see the chapters in part 1) and to resist narratives of dispossession (see the chapters in part 2). The critical task for readers then is to negotiate the narratives of dispossession with the textual details that resist those very narratives. In this connection, a lot hangs on the writing arms of text collectors (interpreters, who are “authors” as well). AUTHORS Relevant to this point is artist Emmanuel Garibay’s Mga may Akda (The Authors, 2009). It features two naked male figures with full bellies, seated on a toilet each. The two male figures represent mainline interpreters, who are “authors” in two ways: they write texts (in which they present their interpretations), and they write as if they themselves authored the texts that they interpret. At one level, Garibay affirms that authors are interpreters and interpreters are authors. And at another level, Garibay critiques interpreters who interpret on behalf and in the interests of the authors. Those interpreters become, and effectively silence, the authors. This is Garibay’s version of the “death of the author.” 18 The angelic interpreter (suggested by his wings and halo) on the left holds a tome open over his open legs, and he appears to rub his nose with a quill pen. He embodies the image expected of a traditional scholar—male, focused and hardworking, even when he is supposed to be letting off steam. His face turns to his right to study a white rose. He appears to not have made up his mind seeing that he has discarded a draft, crumbled up by his left foot between him and his colleague. Or did the crumbled paper belong to his

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colleague on the next commode? Has the churched interpreter (as his miter suggests) given up writing? The churched interpreter to the right (pun intended) has a longer nose, but he does not have a quill. Instead, he closes his right fist and lowers a cross with this left hand. The churched interpreter brings the markers of his office to the toilet. The head of the cross is lowered, as if in homage to the writing of the scholarly interpreter. Or was it simply lowering the eyes of the viewer toward his penis? The eyes of the churched author are open, and his eyebrows are raised to suggest that he is interested in what his colleague writes. Four years later, Garibay produced another work with the same title (figure 1.2). The scholarly interpreter still turns to his right but this time he does

Figure 1.2. Source: Mga may Akda (The Authors, oil on canvas, 2013) © Emmanuel Garibay.

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not have a halo and it is not evident what holds his attention. There is no rose in his line of vision. Instead, his right foot steps on the stem of a red rose. The rose is cut off from its life source, and it has fallen to the floor. There is no crumbled paper between the two interpreters and the eyes of the churched interpreter are closed in this image. His facial expression suggests a frown, maybe in disgust (with what he read in his colleague’s writing). Or was he in pain? Excruciating, in a moment of letting steam off ? Neither of the two authors is attentive to their toilet setting, but this is not to say that they are not influenced by their setting. As suggested above, the contortion in the face of the churched interpreter in the 2013 work could also be due to the situation and the setting. Being influenced by context is irritating for text collectors who do not appreciate being called out as contextual interpreters on the basis of the affirmation that no text, no interpreter, and no interpretation, is set in a vacuum or free from biases (see the chapter by Janneke Stegeman). This is not a new or radical affirmation. It goes back to mainline theologians and biblical scholars who accept that no interpreter is a tabula rasa who interprets without presuppositions, 19 and forward to the growing literature on islander criticism in biblical scholarship. 20 Garibay’s works call attention to one of the toiling settings in which authors write and think, the toilet, a place where the excreted and refused are flushed out. In this connection, there is a critical twist in both versions of Mga may Akda: the toiling of authors and interpreters is flushable. Another critical twist is in the positioning of the quill pen, which depicts the scholarly interpreter rubbing his nose. This posture carries two messages. First, it signals snootiness. Garibay portrays the scholarly interpreter as thinking that he is better, smarter, or more important than his viewers. He is in fact so snooty that he looks away, to avoid the eyes of his viewers. And second, in psychology and jurisprudence, touching the nose signals that one might be lying. So the scholarly interpreter is both snooty and a liar in Garibay’s works. He is not to be trusted. The churched author could also be read in two ways: first, he makes a fist and raises his right arm as if to say “amen” to what he reads in his colleague’s writing. In this case, he too is not to be trusted. Second, his right arm is suspended in what i call the “oops” position—poised to point at or pulled back because of something in his colleague’s writing that he does not approve. In this second case, the churched author breaks away from his scholarly colleague. Garibay offers both possibilities for viewers to author their own interpretation of Mga may Akda. The final word on Mga may Akda has not been made. Both versions of Mga may Akda are open for interpretation (authoring). The contributors to this book also take the Bible as a book that is open for interpretation. The Bible is open for authoring (as in Mga may Akda). It is a “site of struggle” (see the chapter by Gerald O. West), but this is understood

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in different ways in this collection. It is a site of struggle between empire and people (see the chapters by Néstor Míguez, Raj Nadella, Rogelio Dario Barolin, and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda), between cosmic and local concerns (see the chapters by Revelation Enriquez Velunta, Jin Young Choi, and Nancy Cardoso Pereira), between concepts of truth (see the chapter by Graham Adams), and between modes of biblical scholarship—especially between white Western scholarship that pretends to be universal and local context-critical scholarship (see the chapters by Janneke Stegeman and Stephen C. A. Jennings). And on the topic of resistance, the collection affirms that the Bible is open, and it needs to be kept open (see the chapters by Graham Adams and Tatsiong Benny Liew). Garibay’s paintings say and do a lot. They draw viewers into a private space (or inner sanctum) in the ivory tower of scholars and bishops, and strip the authors (read: author-ities) in order to show that in their bare basics they are just like other old men. They might be healthier than poor people, but they have the same number of limps. Juxtaposing the two works shows that interpreters sometimes focus on rosy subjects, and sometimes step on those subjects. Interpreters are sometimes interested in the writings of their colleagues, and sometimes pained if not disgusted by them. Viewing the two works in juxtaposition gives the impression that there is no constancy in the texts produced by authors and interpreters. This is the case also with biblical texts and their interpretations with respect, for instance, to the subjects of empire and resistance. The Bible sometimes supports and sometimes resists empire, so one cannot conclude that it is all about resistance (see the chapter by Tat-siong Benny Liew). Where the Bible does not make up its mind, or pushes back the call for solidarity and preferential option for the poor, negotiation is necessary. NEGOTIATING Scripture plays a significant role in establishing and sustaining religions. Religions differ with respect to their teachings, values and traditions concerning creation, creatures, community and deity—whether there is one, many, or none—but they all need Scripture to survive. And grow. It is in fact difficult for any religion to endure meaningfully if it does not have at least one set of Scripture. Religion needs Scripture(s) to survive; Scripture needs religion(s) to keep both of them current and hallowed. Religion and Scripture interdepend, and both need interpreters to toot their horns. Interpreters come and go, and ways of interpretation remain the same, retract or morph, but Scripture and religion do not easily change or go away. What was said concerning religion and Scripture also applies to nation, both the religious and the secular types. A nation needs Scripture(s) to ex-

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plain, guide, justify, and propagate its existence. In this regard also, Scripture serves political functions—to validate religion and nation; and both Scripture and religion have nationalist biases. Put another way, the three—Scripture, religion, nation—are stores for propaganda. Religion and Scripture need nation(s) to incarnate their propaganda; religion and nation need Scripture(s) in order to explain and justify their existence; Scripture and nation need religion(s) to keep all of them current and hallowed. This can be seen clearly in the case of the modern State of Israel, as discussed above, in which religion and nation overlap at a Scripture. The three—Scripture, religion, nation— interrelate, 21 and they are driven by cultures that privilege writing. Oral cultures on the other hand have other forms of authority and other means of authorizing. In Pasifika, this involves talanoa, a word that refers to three interrelated events: story (myths, legends), telling of stories, 22 and conversation around stories and telling events. One cannot have one form of talanoa without, at the same time, the other two forms. A story (talanoa) needs telling (talanoa) and conversation (talanoa) in order for it to be meaningful and relevant; a telling (talanoa) needs story (talanoa) and conversation (talanoa) in order for it to have content and life; a conversation (talanoa) needs story (talanoa) and telling (talanoa) in order for it to gain interest and engagement. Talanoa is one of the means of authority and of authorization in the oral worlds of Pasifika. Two key characteristics of oral cultures are critical for the move toward negotiation that i make in this chapter: oral cultures are fluid and mediating. I present these two characteristics with respect to talanoa, as a Pasifika example of orality, and i expect that there is something similar in other oral cultures. In its oral form, talanoa (story, telling, conversation) is fluid. It is not written but remembered and (re)told. At the event of its being told, the story becomes fixed. But it is not rigid, for once the conversation begins the story and the telling become fluid again. Flux. The story could change. Transform. And the upshot could be another telling. Retelling. So talanoa (conversation, retelling) is an opportunity to mediate the story (talanoa) and the telling (talanoa). Talanoa (story, telling, conversation) facilitates. Protests. Negotiates. Talanoa as “events” that hold authority, and that authorize as well as negotiate authority, makes what is taken as norm or canon fluid and mediating. With that in mind, i shift to the world of writing: Scripture may have been written and text collectors refer to its “final form,” but it is not fixed or rigid once interpreters offer their insights and converse with one another. Scripture is open and opening (see the chapter by Graham J. Adams). It is in flux and unrest, always moving and open, and available for mediation. In talanoa, therefore, there is no final form. Talanoa may stop; until there is another vibe, and talanoa again ripples. 23

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Fluid and mediating, talanoa is also an opportunity for resistance. One could offer an alternative or countering talanoa (story, telling, conversation); one could tell the same story differently; and one could engage in conversation toward problematizing a story or a telling. Talanoa is necessary if resistance is to take place; one cannot resist without talanoa. The characteristics of talanoa expounded here also apply to Scripture. Scripture is fluid and mediating. The chapters in this collection show that this assertion is true for readers from talanoa and oral preferring cultures, as well as for readers from text preferring cultures. Fluidity and mediation bring me to the spheres of resistance and negotiation. Because Scripture and interpretations are fluid, they could be resisted and negotiated; and because Scripture and interpretations mediate, we could negotiate with them as well. Resistance and negotiation are in Scripture, but they are not all there is in Scripture. Resistance and negotiation are two of the key factors that contribute to the establishment of religions, but they are not current in religions that have become imperialist in their teachings, practices, and readings. In the end then, this chapter puts up a hand in favor of negotiation as a goal for interpreting Scripture and for extending resistance . . . with a caution, that negotiation can turn Scripture into a kapa kuka (tin of live crabs) that will also pinch the hands that reach into it. Negotiation is not about determining what is correct or historical, universal or exclusive, but in finding opportunities for ignored details to say and do things. Preferably, for this native text collector, negotiation serves the interests of displaced natives and deselected offspring. NOTES 1. Cf. A. K. M. Adams, “Reading the Bible in a Sea of Signs,” Reflections (Spring 2008): 52–57 (available at https://reflections.yale.edu/article/between-babel-and-beatitude/readingbible-sea-signs; accessed 10 May 2018). 2. George Yancy, “The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (29 Apr 2018; available at https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-UglyTruth-of-Being-a/243234; accessed 1 May 2018). 3. Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 162. 4. I use the lowercase out of respect for “you,” “she,” “he,” “it,” “they,” and “others” who give me my subjectivity. 5. See Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (New York: William Morrow, 1928). 6. See Jione Havea, “Mission and Mission Routes/Roots in Oceania,” in Christianities in Migration: The Global Perspective, edited by Elaine Padilla and Peter Phan, 113–34 (New York: Palgrave, 2016). 7. Cf. Bryan Nelson, “Polynesian Seafarers Discovered America Long before Europeans, Says DNA Study,” Mother Nature Network (22 Jan 2013; available at https://www.mnn.com/ earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/polynesian-seafarers-discovered-america-long-be fore; accessed 3 May 2018). 8. Aboriginal Heritage Office, “A Brief Aboriginal History” (2006–2018; available at http://www.aboriginalheritage.org/history/history/; accessed 10 May 2018; my italics).

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9. I herewith affirm two complementing conclusions: first, that the texts of the Bible circulated orally and may have reached authoritative status (that is, became scripturalized) before they were written, edited, redacted, and canonized. It is not the written form that gives Scripture authority, for many texts were written (e.g., gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene) but not accepted as scriptural. Second, some Scriptures are drawn (e.g., Indigenous Australian rock art) and in many (both text- and oral-preferring) cultures, stories, legends, and songlines function as Scripture. 10. See Jione Havea, “Genesis 12:1–9: Pilgrimage onto Already-Settled Land,” Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace, World Council of Churches (13 March 2017; available at https:// www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/genesis-12-120139-201cpil grimage-onto-occupied-land201d-by-jione-havea; accessed 9 May 2018). 11. I distinguish settlement (read: dwell, home) from ownership (read: property, capital) for two reasons: first, out of respect to the biblical Canaanites who might not have been possessive in their ways of thinking, and second, in recognition of the principle of terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery as rubrics of international (rather than biblical) law. This distinction, however, should not distract from the obvious: the biblical narrative remembers that the Canaanites were already at home in the land before Abram and his cohort arrived. 12. Abraham B. Yehoshua, “Time to Say Goodbye to the Two-State Solution. Here’s the Alternative,” Haaretz (19 Apr 2018; available at https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.pre mium.MAGAZINE-time-to-nix-the-two-state-solution-and-stop-israel-s-apartheid-1.6011274; accessed 20 April 2018). 13. See, e.g., Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1–60. 14. See Gerhard F. Hasel, “The Problem of History in Old Testament Theology,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 8 (1970): 23–50 15. Cf. Michael Jagessar, “Chanting Down the Shitstem—Resistance with Anansi and Rastafari Optics,” in Religion and Power, edited by Jione Havea, 87–104 (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2018). 16. Implied here is the bilingual signification of the word “gift”—meaning “present” (English) and “poison” (German). 17. See Dominique Ferré, “1947: The Fourth International against the Partition of Palestine,” The Internationale 7 (Aug 2017; available at https://socialistorganizer.com/2017/08/10/ 1947-the-fourth-international-against-the-partition-of-palestine/). 18. Cf. Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text. The Death of the Author, 142–148 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 19. See Rudolf Bultmann, “Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?” in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, 289–96 (Cleveland: Word, 1965). 20. See Jione Havea (ed.), Sea of Readings: The Bible in the South Pacific (Atlanta: SBL, 2018). 21. Religion, Scripture, and nation interrelate but not always exclusively or in fidelity (pun intended). In the case of the modern State of Israel, for instance, one does not need to adhere to the religion in order to take advantage of its formative Scripture or to become a citizen of its nation state. 22. See Mosese Ma’ilo, “Island Prodigals: Encircling the Void in Luke 15:11–32 with Albert Wendt,” in Sea of Readings: The Bible in the South Pacific, edited by Jione Havea, 23–35 (Atlanta: SBL, 2018). 23. See Jione Havea (ed.), Talanoa Ripples: Across Borders, Cultures, Disciplines (Auckland: Massey University, 2010).

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Chapter Two

Ephphatha! DARE to Be Opened! Scripture, Its Civil War, and Shakenness Graham J. Adams

The Bible is both a butterfly and a hurricane! My colleague, Glen Marshall, 1 recently gave a sermon on John 3 in which he argued that any attempt to “nail” the meaning of a text—for example, to insist on one interpretation of being “born again” (or “from above”)—does violence to the Bible. 2 The Bible, he suggested, is like a butterfly, which should not be nailed to a board, as though one meaning can be fixed for all people and all contexts. Rather, the biblical butterfly flutters in our hands, beautiful and gently defiant, a symbol of new life. In other words, the Bible is always signalling to us that the apparently “dead” appearance of words on a page, like a chrysalis, is not the end of the interpretive story, but instead, because “the Spirit blows where she wills,” it comes to life, in ever new ways, surprising us, enlivening us, enthralling us, but also disturbing or unsettling us. Furthermore, the Bible is like a hurricane or at least—as the Spirit hovers over it, acting as midwife, enabling new life to come from it—the “event” of the Bible is disruptive like a hurricane. The newness disrupts our preconceptions, causing problems for us in our desire to superimpose order on to a disordered world. Of course, this perspective may be disturbing, especially for those who are committed to an understanding of God as bringer of order, and of Scripture as the means by which God instructs us in the demands of good order. For such interpreters, the Bible cannot be a butterfly or hurricane, because the Word is more like divine dictation, the kind of authority demanding obedience, in the same way, from all of us. However, paradoxically, such apparent submissiveness to a single understanding of the words on the page—apparently resigning our human agency—is all about the overriding power, and underlying insecurity, of those who insist “this is what it 17

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means.” The paradox is that the desire to read the Bible as the authoritative means by which God instructs us in the restoring of good order can result in violence being done to the Bible, nailing it down, and violence being done to those with sharp experience of the disordered nature of this world. Where people insist that the Bible brings order, and only order, they are deploying it as justification for a status quo that serves the interests of dominant voices. By contrast, allowing Scripture to disrupt our convenient and regulated systems of thought, and as such to bring a kind of disorder where so-called order is hurting people and creation, is actually about “letting God speak,” as awkward and disruptive as that may be. As the Bible repeatedly testifies, God speaks, not so much through those who claim a divine right to conserve the status quo, but particularly through “the least” or those whom the world (including in the world of religion) suppresses, in their struggle for life. The God of the Bible is, in fact, the God who hears the cries of the oppressed and outsiders, the God of empathetic solidarity—with Hebrew slaves, midwives, widows, orphans, and aliens; Moabite refugees, foreign commanders, and widows; Assyrian messiahs and Roman centurions; lepers, tax collectors, and prostitutes; children and all kinds of “little ones”; the poor, bereaved, and meek; the doubters, deniers, and crucified. The God of the Bible does not accept the systems of judgment that make us feel in control and comfortable, but metamorphoses from chrysalis to butterfly in our hands, hearts, and minds; from the thralls of death to the renewal and transfiguring of life and creation. For the Spirit of God—alive for us through, and enlivening our understanding of, Scripture—blows where she wills, “shaking the foundations” of the orderly prisons that we maintain, guard, and occupy (Acts 16:26). The Spirit who captivates our attention is simultaneously liberating us from the captivity of those cells that occupy and preoccupy our thinking, believing, and behavior. The God of the Bible is not revealed in the maintenance of prison walls and the locking of doors, but in the foundation-shaking movement of which Jesus of Nazareth is the embodiment. As British theologian Andrew Shanks has put in correspondence with me, Jesus Christ is “the Earthquake Event.” To bring disorder where human “order” has trampled on the experiences and voices of the least or the last, or to shake foundations that promote their own inevitability, is integral to the ministry of Christ and the ministry of reconciliation that he entrusts to us. Of course, “reconciliation” is itself a kind of order—a restoration of healthy relationship—but for reconciliation to be established, the ways-of-the-world must be disordered, disrupted, shaken. In Christ, crucified and risen, such disordering and reconfiguring of reality is revealed, such that we witness the extravagant and scandalous hospitality of the God who is open to those who have been excluded by our human systems of judgment. It is in this spirit that Shanks reexpresses God’s kingdom as “holy anarchy”—not “chaotic” as such, rather in the sense that its sacredness

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consists in its opposition to any “rule over” (“archy”); 3 but the unfamiliar and unsettling nature of God’s reign can seem like disorder, even chaos, in contrast to the intransigent ways-of-the-world that try to hold people “in place.” God’s reign stirs as a hurricane, or animates as a butterfly, to effect the renewal of all creation. It shakes our foundations and prisons, whether in the world of everyday realities, or in the self-regard of religious communities that fail to be self-critical. This is the radical trajectory I discern and celebrate in the biblical metanarrative. BIBLICAL METANARRATIVE There is a certain irony here, because I am arguing against any interpretation that consists of superimposing “order” on to a chaotic, messy world, yet my hermeneutical strategy supposes that the complexity of Scripture can be understood in terms of one overarching consideration. First, as I hope to demonstrate, my proposed approach is not about projecting good order and disregarding complexity but is a lens that illuminates our conflicted relationship with reality and prompts us to engage more empathetically with it. Second, in a world understandably suspicious of metanarratives, I need to explain why I believe in the possibility of a legitimate metanarrative—or at least a comprehensive explanatory framework that can help with the task of discerning God’s liberating word in the context of empire. Peter Hodgson’s outline of three postmodernisms is hugely valuable in this regard, 4 because, with him, (1) I accept the postmodern suspicion that every overarching interpretation is itself conditioned by the contingencies of context and bias (he calls this “deconstruction”), but this does not mean that the metanarrative quest is innately illegitimate; (2) in response, I am not proposing the “renewal” of a pre-enlightenment metanarrative, whereby we retreat into an earlier confidence in the face of the inadequacies of western rationality; (3) rather, I envisage—or revision—a grand narrative that is ever conscious of its gaps and conditioning, therefore seeks to learn to engage empathetically with reality’s awkwardness. For the reality is that many stories and experiences have been suppressed, the modernist project being largely devised by and for the benefit of white, Western, middle-class men, and their economic interests; therefore, the articulation and living of metanarrative requires a spirit of openness whereby diverse and divergent voices are empowered and enabled to receive from, and awkwardly to challenge, each other. Within such an understanding of metanarrative as unfolding, it is possible to affirm that we are part of one multifaceted story, but when we, as Christians, engage with Scripture, we are urged to be open to suppressed voices and to practice empathetic solidarity with the unsettling diversity of reality.

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Now of course, openness to diversity is found beyond Christianity—and it is a complex issue. 5 However, I am not trying to argue whether one religion is better than others on the basis of the degree of openness it manages to demonstrate toward otherness. Rather, I am asserting that empathetic openness is central to sacred truth, wherever it is found. That is to say, I seek to affirm the synergy between particular strands within religious traditions, wherever people are enabled to be open to and challenged by experiences and insights that differ from theirs. Such enabling is not simply about accepting difference but is about hospitality and compassion in the face of the trauma and injustice caused by systems of domination. In other words, I discern a narrative, within the Bible and beyond it, which attends to reality in its awkward variety and its silenced or forgotten pain. “THE SOLIDARITY OF THE SHAKEN” DISMANTLING “UNATONEMENT” In this perspective, what is the ultimate quest? It is, as Shanks explains, the pursuit of “the solidarity of the shaken.” 6 He borrows the term from Jan Patočka, a Czech philosopher and dissident activist in the context of Soviet domination, but Shanks gives the term an explicitly theological meaning; in fact, it is the language Shanks most frequently uses when inviting us to conceive of “the kingdom of God”—God’s alternative empire, dominion or reign, which, Jesus suggests, is discernible in hidden yeast or buried treasure, or in the childness of children, that is, in fragile but overlooked worth, right under the nose of empire. The solidarity of the shaken is the solidarity of all who are shaken out of lies and half-truths. Just as the foundations of Paul’s prison are shaken, so the poor, the bereaved, the meek, the merciful, the persecuted, and those who pursue justice are “shaken” people: 7 for they have had the scales of unreality peeled away, to know that the rich are living within lies (thinking their blessing is deserved), the un-bereaved are living a lie (taking life for granted), the un-meek are living a lie (puffing themselves up with moral self-worth), the unmerciful are living a lie (convinced that justice requires retaliation), the persecutors are living a lie (acting as though their means are justified by their ends), and those not pursuing justice are living a lie (thinking to pursue it is pointless, or that current injustices are deserved). The shaken, by contrast, are gifted with affinity to reality; puncturing the delusions of unreality, even though they may differ greatly from each other. The shaken are not satisfied with their shakenness but are alert to its constancy, as all kinds of cultural lies, prejudices, clichés and “thought-gonestale,” 8 including within religious traditions, are exposed and overcome. I suggest that the Bible testifies to God’s mission to foster the solidarity of the shaken—but this is not always obvious. It must be discerned, because Scripture also testifies to human efforts to impede and obstruct this process.

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For example, Shanks judges the Book of Revelation to manifest “aggressive propaganda”—though it is arguable that its apocalyptic discourse is more resistant to business-as-usual than he allows. 9 As Shanks sees it, the solidarity of the shaken cannot exist in itself—it is too demanding, too unattainable—but must be hosted by communities that have other loyalties. 10 So religious communities are often defined more obviously by loyalties to family, class, ethnicity, nation, or like-mindedness, or by common addictions to the harm we do (to the earth, to those whom we exploit, to our own human dignity); but even so, religious communities retain the potential for a more disturbing but ultimately godly solidarity—the solidarity of those who differ in so many ways, but share the experience of being shaken out of half-truths that damage our solidarity. These two dynamics interweave with and resist one another: the movement toward the coming “solidarity of the shaken,” and the persistence and power of empire working against such a movement. Shanks explains it in terms of the inner “civil war” that exists within human nature and sociality. 11 On the one hand, under the influence of the more dominant “Rigidity-Principle,” or the “Unchangeable aspect of the self,” 12 we filter disordered reality, editing it and organizing it to fit with our preexisting understanding—a useful and legitimate enterprise in a complex world. On the other hand, guided by the more accepting “Changeable aspect of the self,” we strive to attend to disordered reality as it is, being shaken open by experiences that confound preconceptions. However, the unchangeable tends to subdue the changeable aspect of the self, conditioning us to manipulate reality, suppress aspects of it, or submit to others’ distortions of it. This foundational problem is “original sin,” which Shanks calls “Unatonement”; 13 the condition of being “unatoned,” or not-at-one, with reality. It infects our individual human nature and our social systems. 14 It impedes our readiness to engage with awkward diversity, filters the haunting agony of those who suffer, and contorts our grasp of the goodness of God’s image in “the Other.” Unatonement generates in us a religious devotion to false gods, 15 projections of our deepest prejudices, who are at liberty to justify poverty, oppression, violence, and exclusion—and who are we to defy such seemingly divine declarations? It is akin to Moe-Lobeda’s “moral oblivion,” whereby we are oblivious to our misconceptions about truth and the moral consequences (see Moe-Lobeda’s chapter in this work). For Shanks, then, true religion is concerned with addressing and undoing this foundational problem, as witnessed in Scripture—to unconceal, confront, and convert Unatonement. As Shanks explains, What else, indeed, is true “religion” if not a corporate discipline of opening-up towards difficult reality? In other words: the cultivation of a quite unflinching willingness to recognize what is actually the case, even when it does not fit what

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Graham J. Adams we want to be the case . . . Merely comforting, comfortable religion is religion which is failing to do its proper job. But true religion, in this sense, is a disciplined opening-up towards reality that we find difficult to recognize. 16

In other words, true religion, revealed in Scripture (but not consistently throughout it), must be self-critical, constantly attending to its tendency to collude with the closed-down-ness of prevailing realities. It must dare itself to face the pain of reality, in solidarity with all who are in pain. For Rieger, it is about starting with the question, “what hurts?” 17 —that is the primary entry-point into reality. Also, Shanks argues: we are never fully at-oned. And we need strategies to awaken us, imaginatively and emotionally, with ever-greater intensity, to the problem of our being unatoned. As I would understand it, just this is the core impulse of authentic religion, in all its forms. 18

In other words, this propensity is discernible in “all” kinds of authentic religion. Christian Scriptures are not unique in witnessing to it; neither are they unique in their obstruction of it. 19 For religion itself is infected by Unatonement, with tendencies working against the very thing that true religion ought to address. 20 Theology, then, properly understood, is concerned with the promotion of the highest kind of truth 21—which Shanks calls “truth-as-Honesty” 22 or “truth-asopenness,” 23 which is divine truth. For me, it is truth as divine hospitality to thatwhich-is-not-God: after all, such is God’s grace, being open to relationship with that which is other-than-God. All kinds of religious tradition can find this within themselves, but all kinds are infected by resistance to it; for Unatonement is insidious, cunning, resilient, constantly impressing on us that reality is too demanding and needs to be edited. Furthermore, and getting to the politics of the matter, Shanks writes: “I am talking here about religion in its true character as the very purest antithesis to propaganda.” 24 In other words, while Unatonement promotes itself through seductions that console and pamper us, or through threats that intimidate and quell us, 25 true religion, by contrast, pursues truth-as-openness that is not a brand, 26 or a package, or a manageable framework for living with difficult reality, but is simply the very openness to reality as it is, evoking empathy within us. Of course, the sheer force of reality does not automatically foster empathy within everyone; in fact, many react unempathetically and entrench their closedness to the Other, and those who experience deep oppression cannot be compelled to “open up,” but may need self-preserving security—but Shanks’s challenges are essentially addressed to “the Gang” (the powers-that-be), those enjoying, exploiting, and exacerbating our closedness. The targeting of his message is congruent with the hurricane of the Spirit-blowing-through-the-Word being directed toward the rich and complacent. Nonetheless, Shanks is illuminating the problematic consequences that flow from any closedness—but to de-

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mand openness from anyone would work against the goals of empathy and hospitality, because the whole idea is to be open to perspectives that differ from and disturb one’s own, including seeking to understand those who are closed, but challenging the unshaken powers-that-be with the experience and agency of the shaken who are suffering. No wonder, then, the solidarity of the shaken is the most difficult solidarity to foster, 27 because it requires the deepest self-criticism, the most scandalous openness to religious diversity for its truth-potential and the most demanding political critique of all gang-systems of propaganda. It demands of us a persistently critical engagement with reality, attending to it as it is (rather than as we would like it to be) while simultaneously setting out in the direction of its transformation (rather than accepting its inevitability). DISHONESTY AND DOMINATION Unatonement works against this movement in three particular ways, to which I have begun to allude. In each case, it is as though the promotion of truth-asopenness has been tamed by the desire for “truth-as-correctness,” 28 which is more manageable. “Correctness,” here, means a depiction or grasp of reality that fits with particular assumptions or criteria; so every religion has its truthas-correctness, the events and interpretations that are seen to distinguish it from others—but they are mistakenly assumed to be more important than the higher truth of “truth-as-openness.” To an extent, we need “correctness” to organize us into a coherent solidarity, which is why the solidarity of the shaken is much more difficult (shakenness being an inconvenient basis for commonality). However, in order to be “saved” from our inward-facing tribalisms and un-solidarity, it is “truth-as-openness” that needs to be prioritized. Injustice, which consists in the damage done to the intrinsic worth of some for the advantage and aggrandizement of others, is confronted by “truth-as-openness” because it evokes in us attentiveness to the dynamics of injustice, empathy for its victims, and openness to alternative possibilities, so working for ultimate reconciliation. But three particular manifestations of Unatonement obstruct us. Shanks calls them “dishonesties,” 29 because they work against the truth or honesty of unedited reality. They are: (1) “dishonesty-as-banality”—that thoughtless, unreflective reluctance to engage with the truth-potential of others, being complacently satisfied that one already has “the truth,” so repeating and concretizing familiar clichés, prejudices, and habits; (2) “dishonesty-as-manipulation,” arguably the driver of the others— what “the Gang” does, those with power who seduce and threaten us into submission, so we accept reality as presented to us for the preservation of vested interests; and (3) “dishonesty-as-disowning”—how a tradition or an individual tells itself an edited version of its own story, disowning the moral-

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ly compromising elements in order to feel more innocent and righteous. They are the habits of empire. The first dishonesty is not interested in the otherness of others, 30 so it is not really interested in what other religions have to say. The second dishonesty is interested, both in other religious traditions and a whole range of experiences, but only insofar as it can manipulate them and lead its human herd to follow a particular line. 31 The third dishonesty is not about external others, but how we deal with our own story, cutting ourselves off from certain features of reality that make us feel uncomfortable. 32 In all three cases, the demands of truth-as-openness are tamed, de-scandalized, by the attraction of “unatonement,” luring us to accept an impoverished but more convenient version of reality. So it is within Scripture, and in our engagement with it we allow the butterfly to be tamed or the hurricane to be subdued. We look for a Word that will confirm our prevailing prisonwalls, terms and conditions, or which can be boiled down to a simple narrative: for example, liberals might see faith as the story of living optimistically with difference and resolving injustice, editing out the awkwardly resilient obstructions to such progress; whereas conservatives might see it as the ageold story of fallenness, redemption, and the necessity of particular beliefs; but neither addresses the civil war blazing within Scripture, the struggle between Unatonement and atonement, or why it is that we find ourselves entrenched in our tribes. Neither addresses the more deep-rooted antagonism toward “reality,” preferring their own edited accounts and privileging voices that confirm their own kinds of self-righteousness. Scripture, instead, compels us to face up to That Which Closes Us to the Other: the sheer force of Unatonement within and around us. To help identify this, Shanks draws on Augustine’s analogy of the two cities: the earthly is defined by the libido dominandi, the will to dominate, 33 whereas the heavenly consists in the love of God. In other words, we are closed to each other because of this unatoned state of mind—this structure within us and within which we live, which is marked by the conflict over how to relate to the Other, and which is exploited by powerful imperial forces. By contrast, the truth of divine hospitality and empathy shakes us, exposing us to reality in all its pain while knowing that we in all our diversity, awkwardness and intransigence are loved and liberated, such that relationships and structures can be transfigured. Such “opening up” cannot be achieved merely by human “right thinking,” but is fuelled by the grace of the butterfly and force of the hurricane, to which Scripture testifies, even as Unatonement simultaneously works within it.

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SCRIPTURE AND REALITY: EPHPHATHA! Reading Scripture is, therefore, about this quest for “reality.” I am not professing to “know” reality; rather I am identifying that it is our “unknowing” with which the God of Scripture is confronting us. It is an unknowing that inflicts us in terms of the three dishonesties (here, re-sequenced)—first, there is the willful unknowing, the conscious turning aside from reality, or the concealing of reality from others, because it is both more convenient for us, and serves the interests of those with power, to present ourselves—or be presented—with reality as edited or manipulated (Shanks’s “dishonesty-asmanipulation”); second, there is the lazy unknowing, the indifference, the unconscious resignation to reality as it seems, without due regard for the truth-potential of those who see things differently (Shanks’s “dishonesty-asbanality”); and thirdly, there is the self-delusion that we are attuned to reality, having puffed ourselves up and denied the various ways in which we have suppressed awkward aspects of it—a problem particularly evident in religious traditions but also any movement that purports to be “closer” to the truth (Shanks’s “dishonesty-as-disowning”). How might we see this being addressed in the Bible? Encounters with Jeremiah and Mark help to illuminate the point. First, in Jeremiah, as with the Hebrew prophets generally, there is this clear sense of a conflict between truth and delusion. In Jer 20, the prophet confesses the burden of living with God’s word; after all, unlike the ways of the world, which comfort us with half-truths, Jeremiah is exposed to the rawness of reality—and it hurts. So, through chapter 21, it is the demand to execute justice that preoccupies him, because he has been blessed (or cursed?) with discernment of the system’s oppression of the poor. He sees the truth. And it hurts him. God enables him to see and hear reality: led by the powers-that-be, the community has flouted its covenant-responsibilities to the vulnerable—and this willful or indifferent usurpation of the oppressed’s dignity will have consequences for the whole of society. So Jeremiah strikes at the false shepherds who have let this happen (chapter 23), and denounces the false prophets who have spoken their reassurances but whose consoling words are nothing but “dreams” in contrast to the hard truth of God’s word. For Jeremiah, burdened with the pain of it, God’s word is like a hammer and a fire—it shatters the false certainties of an unjust society, and sears itself painfully into the consciences of those who hear its force and see what is exposed. Then, in 27:9–10, Jeremiah declares: “You, therefore, must not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your soothsayers, or your sorcerers, who are saying to you, ‘You shall not serve the king of Babylon.’ For they are prophesying a lie to you.” Of course, every time and place have false prophets and diviners, including within religious traditions (infected by Un-

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atonement) and in their collusion with imperial ideology. We find ourselves succumbing too easily to the consolation that we shall not serve the king of Babylon—and certainly if we commit to faith in God, we could not imagine that we might actually be serving another lord; but the truth is that religious commitment is no guarantee of immunity against the seductive power of Babylonian/imperial deceit. Even today, Jeremiah warns: Do not listen to your false prophets who say that you shall not serve the king of Babylon; for the God of Scripture, the God of revelation, the God of openness, though often hidden and obscure and inconveniently ambiguous, is nevertheless the God who confronts our complicity with Babylon. God exposes the reality that we are not innocent (so beware of any disowning!); God invites us to wake up to the whiff of religion’s failure to attend to the structural injustice in our communities and world, which has its consequences. Second, throughout the Gospels we see a similar “revelation” as Jesus moves around, exposing the “demons”—the obstacles to the progress of God’s reign—and denouncing and disturbing the forces that hold people in states of exclusion, alienation, oppression, and debt. A series of episodes in the Gospel of Mark illustrate this movement incisively. In chapter 7, there is a seemingly small moment when Jesus encounters a man who is deaf and whose speech is impeded—a symbolic representation of a community’s thwarted efforts to hear the truth and certainly to articulate it; for there are forces at work—fear, violence, and the politics of purity—which obstruct people’s attempts to connect with each other, but it is these that Jesus confronts. “Ephphatha!,” that is, “Be opened!” The indigenous Aramaic (“ephphatha”) speaks to the immediate audience living under domination, but Mark’s Greek narrative “opens it up” to a wider culture, which is fitting for the hospitable demands of truth-as-openness. But this is no sentimental hospitality or easy openness; rather it is the permission and the exhortation to be shaken open to primary reality: the injustice, the suffering, the thwarting of God’s kingdom or the solidarity of the shaken. Flowing from this healing there comes the second miraculous feeding—another hungry “crowd” (Greek: ochlos), the multitude, is fed by Jesus—as a sign that “openness” is not merely about apprehending reality; nor is it simply for the benefit of damaged individuals; rather it is directed toward social transformation—the re-creation of covenant-community. Be opened—and see the hungry fed. Be opened, and turn the libido dominandi into the love of God. It does not stop there. From a healing to a feeding, Jesus then sets out “to the other side,” traversing the lake once more as a symbol of the ministry of reconciliation. Openness is political through and through, prompting us into acts of social transformation, concerned not only with feeding the hungry, but transgressing boundaries and encountering “the Other,” whoever they may be. No wonder, in chapter 8, the religious leaders—here the Pharisees— profess to be bewildered. Perhaps they understand all too clearly what is

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going on and they want to dampen down any enthusiasm for it, though it is also possible that some at least are genuinely intrigued, because there were certainly debates between the different Pharisaic schools, and some would have felt sympathy for Jesus the reformer. Whatever the motive, they ask for a sign, betraying an ignorance of the significance of the unfolding events. Could they not see, conditioned as they were by purity codes and taking for granted the system that legitimized exclusion and oppression, that by feeding the hungry and going “to the other side” Jesus gave sign after sign? Could they not see that, as the representation of God’s truth-as-openness, Jesus demonstrated openness by receiving from others—the gifts of bread and fish—and then giving, so abundantly that there were so many baskets of leftovers? Could they not see that human relationships need to allow for this mutuality, this receiving and giving, rather than be fixed in hierarchies of domination and religious systems of insiders-versus-scapegoats? Could they not see that this movement of jubilee-justice, which promised abundance in a world held captive by scarcity, was signalling a whole new realm (the solidarity of the shaken) erupting into the here and now? Could they not see that “reality” was not only being exposed for its moral bankruptcy, but that “reality” had scope for an alternative horizon that was much closer than anyone could imagine, and which was especially present in the experience of the hungry multitude, the ochlos—the survivors and impure, who were clearly shaken open to reality and its renewal? This series of episodes comes to a climax before the infamous “who do you say that I am?” conversation! In Mark 8:22–26, Jesus encounters another man with a disability—this time, blindness. Once again, representative of the closedness of the culture, as defined by imperial occupation and religiopolitical domination, “reality” could not be “seen.” It remained too much to bear. Even Jesus did not transform this predicament in one swift move, one attempt at healing—after all, the colonizing of our consciousness runs deep, and it takes time to peel away the scales of delusion and the internalization of a narrative of inevitability. So one dose of saliva is not enough. The man begins to see, but people look “like trees walking.” How profound! The process of coming to see other people as people is not straightforward at all; it is both miraculous and learned, the “gift” of seeing people as people. Ephphatha! Be opened—and learn to see each other as rounded human beings, with complex stories, pain and potential, weaknesses and strengths, damage and delusions, hurt and alternative horizons. Ephphatha! Be opened—and dare to see people for all that they are—and to see yourself more clearly, as in a mirror, no longer a glass darkly—and to see reality more fully, for the lies of scarcity and the truth of abundance. Ephphatha! Be opened—and you will no longer be able to return to your home along the same path; a new path will open up; things can never be the same again.

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Like Jeremiah exposing the lies, even though the burden of truth was so painful and contentious, so Jesus also dared to declare “Ephphatha! Be opened!”—prompting people to see the truth of hunger and to believe that there are gifts to be shared; to see the truth of division and to believe that we can indeed cross “to the other side,” in solidarity with all sorts of people; to see the truth of our dehumanization of each other and to believe that we can once again learn to see each other as fully human beings, shaken open. Ephphatha! Be opened! JESUS THE SHAKEN ONE: EPHPHATHA! Elsewhere I have written about Jesus as the Shaken One. 34 The point is that he embodies this spirit or “pathos,” this sensibility, of shakenness: living a life demonstrating empathetic openness or receptivity to all sorts of people, in all their awkwardness, pain, and potential. He reveals to us God’s truth-asopenness, by not being the one who feels compelled to initiate every encounter, but by receiving from others—those within his own tradition who have been “disowned,” those beyond his tradition whose truth-potential has been overlooked due to dishonesty-as-banality, and those invisible to respectable society as the victims of religio-political “manipulation.” That is to say, through encounters with people who had no right to approach him, or whose existence he should have ignored, he shows himself to be shamefully, or shamelessly, but truly “shaken open.” So when he declares “ephphatha!,” he speaks continually to himself too: for shakenness does not end, not even for Jesus, but through resurrection may be ongoing. After all, if crucifixion was an attempt to close him down, to silence him, to suppress his “opening up” of reality, what else is resurrection but the defiant and deviant reawakening of the spirit of openness; 35 and why should that shakenness have ended, even on that first Resurrection Day? For Jesus the Christ in every age and every place, in and through relationships with all sorts of others, both known and unknown, represents for us what it is to be shaken out of every culture’s clichés and prejudices, in order to transform any libido dominandi into the love of God, so the process goes on. While the canon of Scripture is closed, the process of shakenness is not. So, under the guidance of the butterfly-hurricane-Spirit, whose “holy anarchy” disorders our systems of exclusion and domination, we continually attend to the voices which have not yet been heard, including those voices which are not obvious or vocal within Scripture. For there is “yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s Word.” So—Ephphatha! Be opened! Be shaken open, shaken out of the lies of the empire, in solidarity with all others who are being shaken open, even in all their inconvenient diversity.

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NOTES 1. Co-Principal of Northern Baptist College, a partner institution within Luther King House, Manchester, UK, where I also teach missiology. 2. Glen Marshall, Sermon at Luther King House, Manchester, UK (2 May 2017). 3. Andrew Shanks, Hegel versus “Inter-Faith Dialogue”: A General Theory of True Xenophilia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 162. 4. Peter C. Hodgson, Winds of the Spirit: A Constructive, Christian Theology (London: SCM, 1994), 55–56, 59–61. 5. Within a range of religious traditions, there is a strand that seeks to demonstrate that openness to otherness permeates each tradition (e.g. Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and so on), though some thinkers argue that their particular tradition is better suited than others to acknowledge diversity. Thus even the affirmation of diversity becomes a means by which to claim superiority over others. 6. Andrew Shanks, Faith in Honesty: The Essential Nature of Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 3ff. 7. Andrew Shanks, God and Modernity: A New and Better Way to Do Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 16. 8. Andrew Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith: Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2011), 46, 48. 9. Andrew Shanks, A Neo-Hegelian Theology: The God of Greatest Hospitality (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 91–93. 10. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 85. 11. Shanks, A Neo-Hegelian Theology, 112. 12. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 50; Shanks, A Neo-Hegelian Theology, 112. 13. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 46–60. 14. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 60. 15. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 82–83, 88, 97; Shanks, A Neo-Hegelian Theology, 113. 16. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 47. 17. Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 9. 18. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 48. 19. This tension within Scripture is addressed in several chapters in this collection: see chapters by Tat-siong Benny Liew, Jin Young Choi, Néstor Míguez, Revelation Velunta, Stephen Jennings, and Gerald West, all of whom wrestle implicitly with the “civil war” of Scripture. 20. See, e.g., Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 89; Shanks, A Neo-Hegelian Theology, 114. 21. Shanks, Faith in Honesty, 29; Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 46, 72; Shanks, A Neo-Hegelian Theology, 116. 22. Shanks, Faith in Honesty. 23. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith; Shanks, A Neo-Hegelian Theology; Shanks, Hegel versus “Inter-Faith Dialogue.” 24. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 48. 25. Shanks, Faith in Honesty, 11. 26. Shanks, A Neo-Hegelian Theology, 70ff. 27. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 74. 28. See, e.g., Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 7, 82; Shanks, A Neo-Hegelian Theology, 114. 29. Shanks, Faith in Honesty, 11, 45. 30. Ibid, 11. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Shanks, Hegel versus “Inter-Faith Dialogue,” 72. 34. Graham Adams, Christ and the Other: In Dialogue with Hick and Newbigin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 35. See, e.g., Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, 98.

Chapter Three

The People against the Empire Biblical Understandings Néstor O. Míguez

Empire is a power structure that has as its end to submit and exploit the people, and to impose its rule over the key issues of all and any society. It sees people only as an object for control, through a combination of military, political, economic, and cultural domination. The result is always exploitation and the denial of the full humanity of its subjects. It also sees creation as a deposit of endless resources for its pleasure. On the opposite side, God’s will is to create a people who could express a different understanding of human life in its plenitude and diversity and who understand creation as the place for “good living.” 1 That is, a “people” (‘am in Hebrew, laos in Greek, and populum in Latin) is a community that can only be complete by the inclusion of everyone in a harmonic and responsible relationship with the whole of creation. Empires, however, consider themselves complete in their power, and thus exclude any alternative, of any form of control, and thus also contest God. Jesus was crucified because he challenged not only the Roman Empire and its local allies, but the spirit of empires, 2 by the creation of a new people (a new creation in Christ, in Paul’s words). THE EMPIRE AGAINST THE PEOPLE Social struggle in the last two centuries was dominated, in greater or lesser degree, by Marxist analysis: it emphasizes class struggle at the center; the proletariat confronting the bourgeoisie. That was relatively clear in the European scenario, yet it was more nuanced in the so-called third world. The 31

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struggle for independence in the colonies, and the theories of dependence and neocolonialism, showed that beyond the concept of class another kind of actor was decisive. In Latin America, José Carlos Mariategui, founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party, unveiled that, together with class contradiction, other elements that conform a people were to be integrated into the struggle. He clearly indicated that, for example, the question of the indigenous peoples is not solved only with the concept of class, and that in the Andean reality the land issue is not simply a question of the peasants, but of the cultural understanding that the peasants inherit from their ancestral customs. 3 Thus, the concept of class has to be reinforced and revised with a more “popular” understanding. As liberation struggles and theories developed, the issue of race, gender and other ways of oppression became clear and had to be confronted. But, at the same time, there was a danger of dispersion, of the different claims working one against the other, and breaking the constructive power of resistance into many fragments. The category of “people” is proposed to overcome that danger. Through the easy and fashionable accusation of populism, there is the need for a voice that takes into account the diverse claims and is able to coalesce them into a powerful voice that answers the destruction created by imperial politics and police. 4 LOOKING AT THE BIBLE In the Bible we find that the construction of “a people” plays a central role in the struggle and project for justice and life. On the contrary, the great enemy of God is always embodied in imperial forces. Genocide is, in fact, the killing of a people, of a “gen.” The quest for conquest is the maximum denial of God’s will for creation. Biblical texts were produced, at least the vast majority, under situations of foreign domination. The Old Testament reached its present form, the Hebrew as well as the Greek versions, under the rule of Persia or the Hellenistic expansion to the East. We do have, imbedded in the final canonical form, more ancient strata that might be dated prior to these. That might be the case of parts of the so-called preexilic prophets, excerpts of the Pentateuch, some Psalms or historic sagas. But, when we examine those pieces, we also find in most of them an acute awareness of the presence and influence of foreign powers, of the menace and temptation represented by the surrounding forces, in the culture, the politics, the economy and even the religion of the people of Israel. The fact that the final composition is done and declared canonical under imperial dominations should not be overlooked. The selection, the order, and the way the texts are displayed before our eyes are also indicative of a certain

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understanding of the world, which are not void of ideological and theological importance. One of the problems with the historical-critical methods is that it chops the text into pieces, classified according to age, origin, style, and the like, thus concealing the sense of the composition when taken in its entirety. A narrative approach that seriously considers the actual canonical form of the text must look at the continuity and discontinuity of the stories as part of the theological and ideological trends and trajectories that we find in the text. The example of Babel, which I discuss below, is indicative of this. This is also the case for the New Testament. All the “books” included in their canonical form—and this is also valid for the apocrypha—were written and collected under the Roman Empire. The scenery of the empire is always present, in some cases explicitly, in others implicit. Taking the texts in their abstract theological meaning has deprived us from considering how they play against the background of imperial dominion. How they bring their message in contrast with what we have called the “spirit” of the empire. It is my purpose here to show how, while God’s will is to form a people—the Israelite nation in the Hebrew Scripture, and a “people of peoples” in the New Testament—and to renew the whole of creation, empires tend to destroy peoples, to subdue and dominate, to abuse nature to its total depletion. Babel, the First Empire against the People 5 I look at the story of Babel as the first approach to building an empire. We already have some stories of violence in the previous chapters of Genesis, like those of Cain and of Lamech, but those are centered on individual violence. Babel, on the contrary, does not contain individual violence, but a menace to the rest of humanity. The Babel story in Gen 11:1–9 has traditionally been read as a separate story, a myth in its own right, and related to the arrogance of the human race. The diversity of peoples and languages, in consequence, was understood as God’s punishment. But when read in the sequence of the creation of the different peoples, in the genealogies that run all through chapters 10 and 11, it takes another meaning. The significant details that follow are revealing. First, the construction of Babel is already mentioned in Gen 10:8–12, together with Nineveh and other great cities, which constituted the historical enemies of Israel. The location is indicated, in Shinar, in the first case, and Assyria in the second, in order to assure the correct identification of the cities and their meaning. Any Israelite that read or heard those names knew what they meant. Those were empires. Second, the construction of these cities is attributed to Nimrod, a great hunter, a warrior expert in the use of weapons, and the first to make himself great in the face of God. That is, his name is representative of violence, power, and pride. As a matter of fact, it is the first time that the idea of a

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kingdom (as an organization based on the power of a king) is mentioned. Nimrod is also related to Mizraim, Egypt, the other great enemy of Israelite freedom. Third, throughout Gen 10 the diversity of territories, languages, families, and ways of living is described and there is explicit recognition of that diversity at the end of the naming of each ethnic group (vv. 5; 20; 31–32). The explanation of diversity is not punishment, but the variety of families because of the different lands they occupy and the ethnic groups they integrate. Fourth, the constructors of Babel want to “make a name for themselves,” that is, impose their identity upon others. Fifth, the city and the tower represent economic and military strength. They also advance their technical knowledge, building bricks and using bitumen, and with that they pretend to conquer the heavens. Sixth, God’s intervention is not considered as punishment (that word, or any similar, does not appear), but as a liberating act in order to impede a project of dominion. God “descends” in order to see, while Nimrod and his gang pretend to “ascend.” When God descends, as in Exodus 3:8, God has a liberating intention. God’s intervention allows the plurality of languages and the autonomous occupation of the territories by the different groups. The genealogy continues after that break in order to point out the creation of a new people, the descendants of Terah. The Babel story is inserted awkwardly into the genealogies that point to the formation of the Abrahamic family. This is not by chance. It cannot be just a coincidence that Babel is founded in the middle of other peoples as a sign of power, dominion, and pride, which interrupts the smooth development of the narrative of the creation of peoples through the genealogies. It points, in my understanding, to the contrast between the formation of a people, which finally points to the people of God, and the formation of a kingdom that wants to replace God (occupying the heavenly realm). People and Power, the Ancient Tension The whole Israelite history as narrated in the books of the Old Testament can be read as different moments in the tension between people and power. There is a project, a vision, a mandate, entrusted by God to Abraham and his descendants, to build a people that would mean a blessing to all peoples (Gen 12:1–3). Yet, in that task, once and again the project is challenged by another: to acquire power, whether by a group, sector, or class within that people, or in relation to other peoples, as if both were one. Yet, the history proved that they are not compatible: to create a people is to include everyone, establish justice, share resources, propose a joint vision, walk toward a common goal. A blessing of other peoples is not to conquer them. But the narrative that takes us through the journey of Israel, from the very beginning of its

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time as a free nation, tells us of conflicts and exclusion, injustice and corruption, accumulation and neglect of the poor, abandonment of the alliance with God. And all these occur because of the search for internal or external power. In that same sense, the need of an identity is under the contradiction of, in one hand, building an identity over and against others, and therefore to impose it upon the rest, or, on the other hand, to form an identity with others, recognizing itself as part of a larger project that is inclusive of all peoples. This last issue will come to light especially in the New Testament with Paul, though some lines can be seen in Third Isaiah and other prophetic texts. But in the meantime, the imperial ideology grew. Without trying to encompass the whole issue in such a brief summary, I point to some salient points in the Old Testament narrative. First, the claim for a king (1 Sam 7–8) is to renounce a government by the people through the tribal councils. They wish to be “like the other nations,” thus renouncing the particularity of God’s rule. It is not only a decision for a form of government: it is also a bellicose project, for “our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Sam 8:20). After suffering the oppression of the slavery in Egypt, and confronting the expansion of the Philistines, Israel aspires to join a power policy, contagious of the imperial nations that surround it. Samuel’s discourse in 1 Samuel 8:11–18 warns about the consequences of that decision. The subsequent story proves him right. The peak of the monarchy in Israel, Solomon, is the peak of the breach between the power and the people, and also the clear introduction of idolatrous worship. Second, the will for power over and against the people is evident in Solomon’s reign (the imposition of taxes and the labor levy to build the palace and temple), but even more so in the episode following Solomon’s death, which brought about the Israelite schism. The excessive lust for power and riches, through taxation, broke the nation and divided the people. The narratives of both kingdoms, North and South, show over and over again the conflict between the quest for power and the humiliation of the people. The early prophets emphasize this tension as part of their message, making explicit how it contradicts God’s will. They make it clear how the power policy introduces injustice and poverty in the land, and, finally, how those caused the ruin of Israel and Judah. Third, this conflict is also evident in the return from exile where the returning elite, allied with the Persian monarchy, imposed its force over the people that remained on the land, the ‘am ha’aretz. The book of Nehemiah is a clear witness of how the ambition of the elite impoverished the local people (see Neh 5), and the reaction it produced, in this case led by the peasants, men and women. The exclusion of the people of the land from the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple, and the order to expel the spouses that were not Jewish, was part of a power project by the elite. The suffering came for the

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poor families, for the foreign women and their children (according to Nehemiah, even Moses had been forced to divorce) and the possibility of the reconciliation of the people was jeopardized. The consequences can be seen in the conflicts within the Israelite nation in the New Testament times. Fourth, beyond the time of the prophets, the book of Maccabees also shows the rupture of the elite that were allied with the imperial forces of Hellenism and their distancing from the Jewish people, culture, and religion. By the end of that period, those who rebelled against this spurious alliance do exactly what they had rejected. Within that first generation, what was initiated as a protest against the powers became mingled in the power games of international politics and allowed the foreign powers to decide over internal issues. Ultimately, it would be the Romans that put an end to the quest for power by the different parties formed during that time, though they were oblivious of the needs of the common people, and of the people of the land. Roman Empire and the People around Jesus The struggle between empire and people can also be taken as a hermeneutical key to understand certain aspects of Jesus’s ministry. If we take the Gospel story as providing us with some historic facts, we can formulate a sketch of what happened as follows. 6 The charismatic leadership of a rural prophet emerged in Galilee during the time of Tiberius, in the continuation of another leader of the same sort (John the baptizer). He is a town artisan, named Jesus, raised among the simple people of the region. His first followers are from the same social strata, mostly fishermen from around the lake, and some women considered of low class and “impure.” A multitude crowds around this leader, believing he has the power to cure, feed, bless, forgive sins, and transform lives. The local elites perceive this man to be a menace and oppose him. Yet, he is able to defeat them in their dialectic, gaining more fame. The poor, the disabled, the excluded, and the oppressed by the local and imperial powers find in him a champion of their cause and so they follow him. Jesus takes the opportunity to teach about a new way of human relationships, of a new people called “the Reign of God,” and announces the end of all suffering, although some persecution might come in the meantime. He expresses his will to put his own life at risk to that end, and calls others to join him in that way. He is aware that the ruling powers will make an attempt against his life. After some time, Jesus begins his journey toward the capital city of Jerusalem. He reaches the city during the major gathering of the year, the celebration of the liberation of the Israelite people, in the presence of imperial authorities and soldiers. He is proclaimed king by the multitude, appealing to messianic titles, with the cry of “save us now!” (hosanna). Jesus defies the

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local authorities and seeks to overturn the temple commerce. He gains popularity among the pilgrims that crowded the city, who form a shield around him as he preaches and teaches in front of the temple. His words clearly attack the social and political praxis of the ruling parties, particularly the way they exploit the poor, the widows, and the dispossessed, with whom he identifies himself. He also challenges the imperial ideology, indirectly denying the divinity of the emperor. The imperial forces of the city kidnap him during the night of the main celebration and have him tried and condemned; with the acquiescence of the imperial legate, he is executed in the Roman way (crucifixion) in the early morning. The common people and his disciples, and especially the women, helplessly attend and weep at the distance. The voice announcing that he is resurrected spreads among the people and they reassemble around his disciples. In an unexpected way, the initial group grows by thousands, not only among the previous followers, but also from other peoples. They believe the spirit of Jesus dwells among them, and with renewed strength they confront the local authorities, defy the prohibition to speak about Jesus, and constitute a new brother/sisterhood based on sharing, inclusiveness and mutual support. They reaffirm their trust in the glorious return of their savior as universal king and themselves as the new people of God. Through this rough sketch we can see two opposite forces: one, trying to build a new kind of relationship based on mutuality, announcing the “reign of God and its justice,” and proclaiming love as the central commandment. The other establishes breaches among the people, separating between pure and impure, able and disable, rich and poor, having exclusion as its main weapon, and imposing its power to judge and kill. The first one proposes the power of love; the second embodies the spirit of empire and the love for power. Paul, a Universal People against a Global Empire As the message of Jesus spreads, a late convert, Paul, sees the universal dimension of the messianic gospel. Paul—born outside of the immediate Jewish environment and also traversed by the Hellenistic culture, and thus more acutely aware of the global dimension of the Roman Empire—conceives that the people of God can only be a people of peoples. He understands the messianic message not so much as the redemption of Israel, but as the formation of a new people, gathered from the no-ones of all previous peoples (1Cor 1:25–31). He quotes Hosea to affirm that a new people is formed out of no-people (Rom 9:25–26 = Hos 1:10 and 2:23). Paul’s ministry among the nations (ethne) has as its goal to extend the redemptive action of God’s chosen one beyond the limits of only one people. 7 He is a new Moses that brings, not a law of particularities but, a grace of

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inclusiveness. 8 His awareness of the destructive power of the empire becomes evident in the first chapter of Romans—a letter destined to the messianic Jesus believers who live in the imperial capital—as he depicts the wrath of God against those that suppress the truth through injustice. In order to overcome this annihilation of humanity it is necessary to overcome the law as a power device, and to establish a new kind of justice, designed by God in Christ: the justice of grace. Grace creates the possibility of universal inclusion, while the justice of the law creates the possibility of universal damnation. The universality of the new people of God is seen by Paul as the start of a new creation (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15), of a new human condition. The corruption of the old creation, its divisions and futile quest for power is to be set aside. The resurrection of the Messiah is the sign of a new start that allows for the hope of the hopeless, for the liberation of all the children of God (Rom 8:18–25). The new people of God are the witness of the presence of the Spirit of God (“for we have the first fruits of the Spirit”). The spirit of the empire (rulers, power) can challenge God’s love, but will be unable to defeat it (Rom 8: 37–39). People Chosen by God 1 Peter 2:9–10 brings a strong statement: But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, [God’s] 9 own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of the God who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

In order to witness “the mighty acts” and “the marvelous light of God” we are constituted into a people. All the words used confirm, not individual persons that are saved, but collectivities gatherings with identity: a race (genos), a priesthood (ierateuma), a nation (ethnos), a people (laos). It is through being a people that we receive mercy. The final book in the canonical order, Revelation, is perhaps the most political writing in the whole Bible, and perhaps the strongest text against imperial dominion of its time. The empire is depicted as a monstrous beast that has the power to deceive the multitudes as well as the ability to dominate, destroy, and kill peoples. We cannot do here a nuanced study of the many ways it denounces the imperial arrogance and the suffering of the humble, as well as its destruction of creation as a whole, to a degree that God has to provide a total renewal of creation, and the recognition of God’s people in the final manifestation of God’s redemptive purpose. From Egyptian Pharaohs, passing through the Roman emperors, the medieval kings of Christendom, to the present-day imperial presidents, empires

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propose military heroes, divinized emperors, and heartless conquerors, images of powerful and self-made individuals, as human ideals. Instead, God calls the enslaved, the marginalized, the lowly, and the despised to form God’s people. A coalition of imperial kings constitutes the last enemy to be defeated (Rev 19:19–20), yet, in the New Jerusalem “the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples (laos), and God in person will be with them” (Rev 21:3). The last vision of the Bible is a city without temple nor castle, a people living in peace, a comforting God that wipes the eyes of the victims and proclaims no more harm, no crying or exploitation, no more death. NOTES 1. See Néstor Míguez, “Together towards Life and Contemporary Latin America Theology,” in Ecumenical Missiology: Changing Landscapes and New Conceptions of Mission, edited by Kenneth R. Ross, Jooseop Keum, Kyriaki Avtzi and Roderick R. Hewitt, 519–29 (Oxford: Regnum and Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2016). 2. See Joerg Rieger, Jung Mo Sung, and Néstor Míguez, Beyond the Spirit of Empire (London: SCM Press, 2009). 3. See José Carlos Mariategui, Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971). 4. On the issue of “populism” see Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). For the concept of people close to our understanding here, see G. Agamben, Means without ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 29–36; Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For a discussion on the concept of people as a political category see Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière, What Is a People? New Directions in Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 5. The exegetical approach I present here is a summary of a larger hermeneutical article: see Néstor Míguez, “Comparative Bible Study. Genesis 10–11: An Approach from Argentine” in Scripture, Community and Mission: A Festschrift in Honor of D. Preman Niles, edited by Philip Wickeri, 152–55 (Hong Kong: The Christian Conference of Asia and the Council for World Mission, 2002). 6. See also Néstor Míguez, Jesús del pueblo (Buenos Aires: La Aurora/Bíblica Virtual, 2016). 7. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2003). 8. See Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2003). 9. In the Greek versions the word “God” is not present: “an owned people” is the literal translation. We have used the NRSV, but adapted it for inclusive language.

Chapter Four

The Text Collectors White Dutch Biblical Appropriation Janneke Stegeman

In the Netherlands, a debate on, or even a crisis of, “national identity” is taking place. Black Dutch activists and scholars such as Gloria Wekker, Philomena Essed, Quincy Gario, and Anousha Nzume are the protagonists of a long-standing anti-racism movement that is becoming more prominent and outspoken. 1 Voices of black and brown Dutch people have long protested racism and colonialism, but a new generation is explicit in their activism and protest. An example is the protest against the phenomenon of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). 2 The debate uncovers the fragility of white Dutch identity and the dominant strategy to dismiss the connection between “present ethnic humiliations and the brutality of colonization, slavery and antisemitism.” 3 Many Dutch people respond with anger, fear, and even violence. Politicians also take part in the debate, to establish a more unified national identity in different ways, for instance by coining an image of a “normal Dutch citizen.” The leader of the Christian Democrats (CDA), Sybrand Buma, relabeled angry Dutch people as “normal Dutch people” (“gewone Nederlanders”). 4 In their campaign for the March 2017 elections the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) used the slogan “Act Normal” (Normaal. Doen.). Being or acting “normal” is the precondition for inclusion into Dutch society, it is suggested. Referring to Zwart Piet, Prime Minister Mark Rutte stated, “You would not want a confrontation between children and angry activists, and: Sinterklaas is a beautiful tradition, a celebration meant for children. So let’s all act normal.” 5 The implication is that acceptance of Zwart Piet is “normal,” protesting it is not. In this discourse on national identity and “normality,” Dutch Christian heritage plays a peculiar role. The secular “we” in the Netherlands used to be 41

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constructed in opposition to the religious other. However, the standards and values to which we are to return are now found—by both Christian and secular politicians—in the presumed “Judeo-Christian roots” of present-day Dutch society. Christianity in its “secular” disguise of “Jewish-Christian culture” is gaining new popularity and normativity as a source of national identity. This Christianity is emptied of theological content, and the Bible is invoked as a token. This Christianity is assumed to be innocent: the role of theology and Christianity in the legitimization of colonialism and slavery is not discussed. In this chapter, I explore connections between Dutch protestant appropriation of biblical texts, Dutch colonialism and the contemporary illusion of “Jewish-Christian” superior culture. By inscribing ourselves in the biblical texts as its central protagonists we have appropriated these texts. We have become text collectors, and behind these piles of texts our bodies have become invisible. DUTCH NEUTRALITY AND WHITENESS As a white Dutch theologian, I was not trained to contextualize. White theologians from the global North are trained to perceive subaltern voices, such as feminist and black voices, as contextual. We tend to continue to hear Western voices as universal, male voices as “normal,” white voices as normative. Our bodies are so invisible in their normativity. I became aware of (my) whiteness, 6 the relevance of the Dutch colonial past to contemporary racism and racialization of, for instance, Muslims, only when attempting to understand Dutch political and church responses to the Israeli-Palestinian context. With respect to Israeli-Palestine, Dutch Christians tend to pose as innocent and well-meaning outsiders having a neutral perspective on the conflict. This self-image is also based on and enforced by our appropriation of the Bible. Whiteness in the Netherlands has a specific history and constellation that is intimately connected to Christianity. Racism was never as visible and tangible in Dutch society as it was in the US slave trade even though slavery took place in the Dutch colonies. Dutch society became “multicultural” only in the 1960s, after the independence of (Indonesia and) Surinam. “Dutchness” always remained implicitly white, Dutch racism is “subject to institutionalized ignorance.” 7 THE DOMESTICATION OF THE BIBLE Here, I am interested specifically in biblical interpretation and appropriation as interconnected with understandings of Dutch identity. Like what Amiel

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Alcalay does in his book After Jews and Arabs (1992), I want to reframe the way in which my religious community connects with its texts. Alcalay, an American son of Sephardi Jews, maps out “a space in which the Jew was native.” 8 According to the “conventional patterns and hierarchies” for studying Western civilization, Arabs and Jews exist in dichotomies. This left little room for the realities, localities and “densely overlapping matters” of the Levant, or for the crucial roles of Arabs and Jews as active participants in the formation of “European” culture. Alcalay uncovers and connects memories, prose, and poetry of the Levant and thus creates a new framework to understand the Levant. Robert Smith, an American Protestant revisiting the use of the Bible in tradition, traces the roots of Protestantism’s literal and historical interpretations of the Bible’s prophetic literature back to the Reformation. 9 Whereas medieval theologians tried to embrace as many approaches as possible when interpreting biblical texts, Luther insisted on literal interpretation. 10 It led to appropriation that centered the role of a people in history: the identity of the people of Israel—at times constructed as separate, pure, and unique—in biblical literature was appropriated. The Reformation coincided with and stimulated the formation of nation states and national identity. 11 In European Christian imagination these Israelites became a nation, like Germans and Dutch who wanted to be a “nation” too. They inscribed themselves in the text as biblical Israelites. Luther’s linear interpretation produced one view on history, with European Christians in the center, and Jews, Muslims, and Catholics as its antagonists. After the Dutch declared their independence over their Catholic Spanish rulers in 1581 and formed the Dutch Republic, the country soon became a colonial power. Protestantism was a key factor in national identity—the Eighty Years War did not end until 1648—and in its colonial attitudes. The Bible became the Dutch national book—a book for white people about white people—it became the book of our national history. Dutch Protestants too understood themselves as the central protagonists of the biblical narratives. The narrative of the Dutch colonial empire was one of a Christian, superior, civilized mission aimed at barbarian others, whom they could expel, civilize, use, or murder. Blacks, Jews, Muslims, and natives were all believed to be inherently inferior. And though their racial histories are not the same, in the racial hierarchy white European Christians were seen as superior. Uncovering the role of biblical interpretation sheds light on the links between colonialism, racism, anti-semitism, and Islamophobia. For the largest part of European history, Jews fell into the same category as Palestinians and people of color: they were racialized as non-white. Such links between colonialism, racialization, and biblical interpretation need to be illuminated for European churches and theology to understand their history and current position and influence.

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In the process of secularization, religion was expected to be a private affair. The Bible was increasingly understood as a religious document, instead of a document with political implications. The context of the books was no longer needed, now that the text collectors had established themselves as the central protagonist not only of the Bible but of a secularized narrative of civilization. The texts were moved to the attic, but its echo can still be heard: even in secular Dutch national identity, “white” and “Christian” are still connected. 12 Our secular self-image makes it difficult to discuss the role of religion in the already very heated debate on racism. The Dutch understanding of “secularity” is shaped by the history of Christianity. Today, the discourse on Dutch secularity includes Protestantism as part of our culture: secularity with its presumed freedom and democracy is claimed as the produce of our Judeo-Christian soil. Emancipation of women and sexual minorities are presented as secular “results” anchored in Judeo-Christian roots. As Ernst van den Hemel asserts, “JudeoChristian” does not refer to religious content or practice. Rather, “a localized, historically grown, and religiously-oriented cultural identity” is referred to as “postsecular nationalism.” 13 It is a nationalism that refers to religious roots, but from a post-Christian perspective. 14 An example is homo-nationalism that manifests itself as pro-gay and anti-Islam. 15 The Bible now is a cultural artifact symbolizing our superiority and moral supremacy. It is emptied of content and certainly not a political book. It is silent and not dangerous. This innocent protestant and post-secular Bible perpetuates our innocence and the othering of others. Ironically, it is an empty identity and an empty bible. “White” only indicates what we are not, the reference to Jewish-Christian roots, too, mainly functions to express what we are not: Muslim. These are expressions of borders, lacking any content. DE-DOMESTICATION OF THE BIBLE The Bible, now empty, and the tradition, now muted, became symbols of the superiority of our culture. The hermeneutics of innocence is applied to us. The way in which “we”—Dutch white Protestants—have come to see texts and identify with texts informs the contemporary illusion of Jewish-Christian superior culture. Christianity is reintroduced to enforce our “innocent” and superior identity. Catherine Keller criticizes quests for origins: the Bible is not a book about “true origins,” but new beginnings, she states. A search for “true origins” is exactly what is taking place in the Netherlands. Keller underlines the messy, “tehomic” aspects of the Bible. Dutch identity, of course, is messy and tehomic. Keller writes about her relation to the Christian tradition: “Yet I wish not so much to stand outside this tradition as to let its own lost waters liquefy

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its boundaries.” 16 This resonates with how activists relate to Dutch society and identity: they aim to destabilize and transform Dutch identity by making explicit what is already part of our past and our narratives. A similar process of provincialization and transformation of the position of the Bible is necessary. A Palestinian-Christian priest once said to me in the context of the Israeli occupation and appropriation of the Bible: “I want to go back to loving the Bible.” White Dutch Christians (like me) on the other hand, have created distance between ourselves and the texts that we collected and appropriated as our book but then discarded it. We should open the book again and allow ourselves to be destabilized and disturbed by what we read. By the strangeness of it, since the struggles for identity taking place in these texts are not the struggles of white people in a post-secular society. This is not our text and this closed book cannot be our token of superiority. To a certain extent, any reader is to be disturbed by the sometimes oppressive, violent, xenophobic, and misogynist texts it also contains. It would be naïve to think of the Bible as an innocent book. Rather, the messiness, violence and layeredness of the Bible should be taken as a clue that our identity, too, is messy. Its xenophobia should be taken as a hint that we, too, are often xenophobic. Lastly, there still is much work to do in clarifying the specific history of appropriation of the Bible in the Christian West, the misuse of the Bible to legitimize colonialism and slavery. In any rereading of the Bible in the Dutch context, we should be aware of whiteness. Not because it is in the texts themselves, but because it is the elephant in the room of our interpretations. NOTES 1. See Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving, “Innocence, Smug Innocence and Resentment: An Introduction to Dutch Racism” in Dutch Racism, edited by Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving, 9–30 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 2. Zwarte Piet is the sidekick or “helper” of Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Santa Claus. Zwarte Piet is impersonated by white people in blackface, red lips, wigs, and golden earrings. The practice has been widely condemned as racist—for instance in a report from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued on 28 August 2015. Although in some instances Zwarte Piet became Rainbow Piet, the caricature remains dominantly blackfaced. 3. Essed and Hoving, “Innocence, Smug Innocence and Resentment,” 11. 4. Sybrand Haarsma Buma, H. J. Schoo-lecture “Tegen het cynisme,” De Rode Hoed, Amsterdam (4 September 2017). 5. Mark Rutte, “Zwarte Piet” (n.d., https://www.rtvnoord.nl/nieuws/186365/PremierRutte-over-Zwarte-Piet-discussie-Laten-we-een-beetje-normaal-doen (accessed 18 December 2017). 6. I understand whiteness as the art of being invisible. As existing in a body that is never mentioned, and never problematic. “Whiteness is a political project to defend and enforce the radicalized social order of white supremacy” (Akwugo Emejulu in her blog “The Centre of a Whirlwind: Watching Whiteness Work,” quotes Mills: “whiteness is committed to ignorance, it

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operates collective and calculated forgetting, but also as a refusal to know” (https:// www.versobooks.com/blogs/2934-the-centre-of-a-whirlwind-watching-whiteness-work). 7. Essed and Hoving, “Innocence, Smug Innocence and Resentment,” 13. 8. Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs, Remaking Levantine Culture (Saint Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 1–3. 9. Protestant Zionism served as crucial inspiration to Jewish Zionism. It was born out of self-interest and anti-Judaism and even anti-Semitism rather than love of Jews of Judaism. In England, a Puritan Protestant tradition of Judeo-centric prophecy interpretation developed in the early Elizabethan period. Such ideas were brought to North America by English colonists with Puritan commitments, and provided a foundational framework for American self-understanding. See Robert Smith, More Desired Than Our Own Salvation, the Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 10. In Luther’s case, although anti-Semitic, this interpretation is Judeocentric. He considered the Antichrist as a two-headed demonic entity: a “Turco-Catholic” Antichrist. Both Muslims and Catholics were considered to be two sides of the same satanic coin. Luther was also the first theologian to advance the notion of the conversion of Jews as a group, preceding Christ’s return. 11. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 12. Anya Topolski reflects on white privilege in Belgium where Catholicism is part of cultural heritage. Both in Belgium and in the Netherlands the construction of whiteness implicates a connection to Christianity in Belgium, such cultural Christianity is Roman-Catholic whereas in the Netherlands it is Protestant. See Anya Topolski, “Wit privilege is niet alleen maar wit,” https://www.mo.be/column/wit-privilege-niet-alleen-maar-wit (28 November 2017, accessed 2 December 2017). 13. Ernst van den Hemel, “Postsecular Nationalism: The Dutch Turn to the Right & Cultural-Religious Framing of Secularity” in Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World, edited by Guy Vanheeswijck Hans Alma (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming). 14. Anne van Bruggen, “The Rise of Dutch Neo-Nationalism” (February 2012) http:// yris.yira.org/essays/311 (accessed 22 November 2017). 15. Alex de Jong, “Pro-Gay and anti-Islam” (2015; https://roarmag.org/essays/wilders-fortuyn-nationalism-netherlands/ (accessed 22 November 2017). 16. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep, A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), xviii.

Chapter Five

Gemma Augustea, Imperial Paradox, and the Matthean Resistance Raj Nadella

Matthew’s story of Herod Antipas’s birthday banquet (Matt 14:1–12) encapsulates many characteristics of a grisly movie. It contains (or makes references to) a lavish feast attended by prominent men, incest, a vengeful woman, a young woman who dances impressively and demands a pound of flesh, a flawed but reasonable king who makes a risky promise he regrets, royal reputation on the line, and a prophet’s head on a platter. Like most banquet stories in the gospels, this one symbolizes generous hospitality, but the text also highlights the exclusive nature of the gathering—meant only for courtiers and officers, and the leading men of Galilee—and Herod’s display of power and wealth. The story, however, stands out for the abrupt turn of events whereby a joyous feast intended to commemorate Herod’s birth takes a gory turn with John the Baptist’s head landing on a platter and presented as a reward. The story also stands out for its various contractions and paradoxical realities. Readers of Mark and Matthew will observe that Herod’s banquet, which was intended to celebrate one’s birth, results in the termination of another’s life. The peace that generally marked royal courts meets the violence that is carried out regularly at the edges of society. The elegance of the banquet intersects with a grotesque display of John’s lifeless head. Herod’s extravagant lifestyle stands in stark contrast to John’s life of simplicity that the evangelist had highlighted earlier in the gospel. There have been numerous explanations for the motive behind John’s murder, perhaps none as fascinating as Oscar Wilde’s. 1 Matthew suggests that Herodias held a grudge against John for his criticism of her immoral marriage to Herod and plotted to have him eliminated. Herod had John 47

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executed in order to honor the oath he made to Herodias and her daughter in the presence of his powerful guests. 2 This seems like a logical explanation, except that Herod did not have the reputation as someone who always honored his commitments to those less powerful than him, as evident in the nullification of his marital commitment to Phasaelis, his first wife. 3 HEROD’S BANQUET AS A METAPHOR FOR THE EMPIRE’S ECONOMIC PRACTICES IN GALILEE An alternative explanation for John’s execution comes from Flavius Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian. In this account, having John executed was an agenda of Herod Antipas and consistent with his political and economic interests. Josephus suggests that Herod eliminated John, who was popular with the masses, primarily because the latter had exposed the extreme contradictions that characterized Herod’s regime. John called attention to Herod’s oppressive rule that subjected ordinary people to excessive violence on the pretext of maintaining peace and order. He challenged the tetrarch’s exploitative and exclusive economic practices that enriched a few at the expense of the vast majority of people in Galilee, prompting fears of an insurrection. 4 Herod Antipas built cities such as Sepphoris, Betharamphtha, Sebaste, and Tiberias, the last of which he dedicated to the emperor’s family and in which considerable wealth was concentrated. Although he was not as ambitious a builder as his father, he nevertheless undertook massive civic improvement programs that enhanced the region’s economic worth and his political clout with Rome. Herod was able to undertake such massive building projects primarily by taxing Galileans heavily and through massive landgrabbing practices. Tiberias, his power base in Galilee, was an early example of his land-grab. The city played a key role in perpetuating Rome’s practice of systematically moving resources from peripheries of the empire such as Galilee to the metropolitan capitals of Tiberias and Rome. The empire rewarded Herod and the city for their loyalty and for participating in its economic agenda. It was one of the cities that remained prosperous during the first Jewish war (66–74 CE) even as the towns and villages around it were pillaged by the Roman armies. The vast majority of the people in the region were villagers, and they lacked the means to cope with the economic and cultural impact of massive construction projects such as Tiberias and other economic policies of Herod Antipas. 5 The region was often referred to as Galilee of the Gentiles, and many Judeans, especially the elite, migrated to Galilee during the Hasmonean era toward the end of second century BCE to take advantage of its resources. 6

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Yet despite its rich natural resources, Galilee was deprived of any sustainable economic growth that benefited its inhabitants, leading to constant unrest. Galilee’s plight and its mistreatment by Judean elite was primarily a result of its distinct status vis-à-vis Judea. As R. T. France has observed, Galilee was distinct from Judea and Samaria in a variety of ways—history, political status, geography, culture, and economy. 7 Herod’s building projects and larger economic practices only added to the economic woes of ordinary Galileans. John preached a baptism of metanoia (Matt 3:1–6; Mark 1:4), a Greek word which is often translated as repentance but has the connotation of turning around and adopting a new mindset. Within the context of oppressive political and economic structures in first-century Galilee that enabled some to live by taking the lives of others, this emphasis on metanoia should be seen as a call for transformation of those structures. In Luke’s account, when asked how they must repent, John encourages his audience, especially imperial agents such as tax collectors and soldiers, to not perpetuate the empire’s oppressive economic practices, but to practice an economy of sharing (Luke 3:10–14). In addition to criticizing the empire’s economic practices, John modelled a life of simplicity, alternative food habits, dress, and location. He lived in the wilderness and “was clothed with camel’s hair, and had a leather girdle around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey” (Matt 3:4). As James Tabor observed, “Jesus had contrasted John’s lifestyle with those clothed in soft robes who live luxuriously in kings’ palaces (Luke 7:25). The reference to Herod and his ilk is unmistakable.” 8 John was inviting people to join his alternative lifestyle and values, and a great many including the elite were drawn to him. 9 Such a prophetic and political presentation of John’s ministry would have been much more threatening to Herod than any criticism of his marital or sexual life. 10 Since John’s preaching had the potential to undermine Herod’s economic practices, Herod had to ensure that it met with serious consequences. Seen this way, John’s murder symbolizes the extreme violence that Rome and its vassals unleashed against those who disagreed with it and to deter others who might consider challenging its oppressive regime. The very imperial structures and practices that John had exposed as oppressive and exclusive were on full display in the banquet at which Herod decided to take John’s life. But the banquet also becomes a metaphor for the empire’s economic and political policies. As Josephus suggests, John’s head ended up on a platter because the empire saw him as detrimental to its ability to host such exclusive banquets—literally and metaphorically.

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DEATH (OF MANY) ENGENDERS LIFE (FOR A FEW): GEMMA AUGUSTEA Rome depicted itself as an enlightened empire that was committed to maintaining civilizational values and as a champion of peace, prosperity, and dignity for all its subjects. However, there was a stark contrast between its moral claims and realities on the ground that a vast majority of the people were subjected to abject poverty, violence, and suffering, primarily as a result of Rome’s political and economic policies in its colonies. It continued its domination of colonies while subscribing to the notion of equality of all races. 11 How does one reconcile these paradoxical realities? Prior to the Augustan era, Rome held ideals of equality of all humans and universal brotherhood in abstract terms while reality on the ground was marked by extreme inequality. Its politically expedient approach was to perpetuate domination over vast sections of the population while claiming a commitment to those abstract moral values of equality and freedom. By the time of Augustus, however, the Roman Empire justified this paradox with imperial propaganda that is evident in the first-century sculpture Gemma Augustea. 12 This is a two-tier cameo engraved gem carved around 12 CE, the upper-tier contains scenes of peace, prosperity, and celebration of the emperor’s family. Tellus Italiae is seen holding a cornucopia and is surrounded by her two chubby children, conveying abundance. The lower tier depicts war, hunger, and torture of enemies. The couple in the lower left are depicted as barbaric, with one of them bound, while the two people in the lower right are dragged by their hair. The twin realities of celebration and suffering make it somewhat paradoxical, but from an imperial perspective peace at the top and brutality at the bottom was not a contradiction. As Tonio Holscher observes, “These pitiful sufferings of the enemy only enhance the greatness of the emperor . . . The goal of this type of representation was obviously, in the first place, to enhance the glory of the victor and the suffering of the defeated.” 13 Rome’s new propaganda suggested that in order for some to live, others would have to die, and that for privileged communities to maintain their quality of life, those at the margins would have to sacrifice their dignity, basic necessities, and even their lives. 14 From a Roman viewpoint, there is a causal connection between the two layers. Peace in the metropolitan center was made possible through war and extreme brutality in the colonies. 15 Prosperity for the elite was achieved by subjecting those at the margins to abject poverty and by denying them their dignity and right to live their lives in accordance with their own vision and values.

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God’s Wine with Humans: Divine Approval of Imperial Paradox In the upper register of Gemma Augustea, Emperor Augustus is surrounded by several divine beings. To his right is goddess Oikoumene, a personification of the entire world, crowning him. At his feet is an eagle, representing Jupiter, looking up (admiringly?) at Augustus. To the far right are Oceanus— god of the oceans—and Tellus Italiae, personification of the earth, celebrating Augustus’s elevation to power with a cornucopia in hand. Both of them look on approvingly at the emperor as Oikoumene crowns him. On the left, seated right next to Augustus is Roma, the personification of the city of Rome, who also appears to endorse the crowning of Augustus. To the far left are Tiberius and Germanicus, two potential successors to Augustus. Needless to say, gods are wining with the emperor and his royal family. Furthermore, Augustus is half-naked, suggesting that he is semi-divine or that he was well on his way to becoming divine. An obvious implication of this image was that Augustus was divinely chosen to rule over the entire civilized world, but Gemma Augustea could also be suggesting that the violence in the lower register was divinely sanctioned. Figures in the lower register—who appear to be prisoners of war— are made to kneel before Roman gods, Diana for instance, and beg for mercy. This is a clear example of religion providing justification for oppressive and violent politics. 16 MATTHEW EXPOSES ROME’S IMPERIAL PARADOX; YET FALLS SHORT Empire employs excessive violence as a tool to terrorize anyone who refuses to be complicit in its agenda. Matthew highlights Rome’s excessive violence at least three times (chs. 2, 14, 27). The story of Herod’s banquet resembles the imperial paradox for which Gemma Augustea sought to provide political and theological justification, but Matthew’s story also exposes the violence and immorality of such imperial paradox. Although both Mark and Matthew call attention to the empire’s excessive violence, they shift the agency toward women by blaming Herodias as a deviant and vengeful woman who was responsible for plotting John’s murder (Mark 6:2–5; Matt 14:6–8). Even as the two gospels expose the empire’s oppressive practices and proclivity for excessive violence against its subjects, they subordinate gender concerns to anti-imperialist concerns. A similar switch took place during India’s struggle for independence from the British, when the intersection of empire, race, and gender repeatedly came to the fore. Sardar Vallabhai Patel and Mohandas Gandhi, two leading figures in India’s independence struggle against the British regime, were

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often unwilling to hold British men responsible for the imperial violence. In many of the writings from that era that were critical of the British Empire, it is often the British women who were depicted as deviant and violent figures who were unsympathetic toward the Indian struggle for independence. Such depictions occurred despite evidence showing that several British women, including Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of “Lord” Mountbatten, were deeply sympathetic toward Indians. Charles Ball’s History of Indian Mutiny (1858) contains an image from that era that depicts a colonial woman holding a pistol. 17 The image raises several interesting questions. Was the image commissioned by those associated with the British Empire? Or, was it a work of Indian groups fighting the empire? If the former, was the empire trying to suggest that the British woman felt threatened by brown Indian men who might have been acting in a barbaric fashion and was therefore justified in unleashing violence? It could also reflect an attempt by the empire to justify its male violence as that which was carried out on behalf of colonial women. In either case, colonial women would have been portrayed as the reason for imperial violence. Similar issues are at play with Matthew’s depiction of Herodias and Salome in the banquet story. If on the other hand the image was undertaken by Indians, it might be reflective of a tendency on their part to hold British women partly responsible for the excessive violence of the empire while refusing to attribute similar responsibility to colonial men. 18 A SAFE PLACE IN THE WILD: PARADOX OF A DIFFERENT KIND Matthew suggests that when Jesus heard (or because he heard) the news of John’s death, he withdrew from there in a boat to a lonely place (Matt 14:13). Matthew uses the Greek term ἀνεχώρησεν to refer to Jesus going away with his disciples (14:13). The term literally means “withdraw” and is used by Matthew in other instances—Joseph and Mary fleeing to Egypt when Herod sought to kill Jesus (2:14); Joseph choosing to move (flee) to Galilee instead of Judea when he heard that Arhelaus was governing there (2:22); Jesus withdrawing into Galilee when he hears of John’s arrest (4:12); Jesus withdrawing from Chorazin and Bethsaida when he learns that the Pharisees were plotting to kill him because of his breaking Sabbath rules (12:1–15). These texts depict people escaping threats to their lives. Seen in this light, Jesus going into the wilderness with his disciples may be taken as their escape from the violence Herod had unleashed against his critics. On an intertextual level, there are parallels to the Israelites escaping from Egypt and fleeing into the wilderness. When people (the “crowds”) learned that Jesus withdrew into the wilderness, they followed him there by foot. This reference to people

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fleeing their habitats along with Jesus calls attention to the empire’s ability and proclivity to terrorize its subjects in order to occupy their lands. This tactic was used frequently by the Roman Empire and by modern empires such as the United States. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have observed, “The North American territory [was] imagined as empty only by willfully ignoring the existence of the Native Americans—or really conceiving them as different order of human being, as subhuman, part of the natural environment. Just as land must be cleared of trees and rocks in order to farm it, so too the terrain must be cleared of the native inhabitants.” 19 Land grab occurs on a regular basis in other places such as Kashmir in the name of economic development and enhancing national security. In the last twenty years, the Indian army, the air force, and other military forces have taken possession of vast stretches of public and private lands in Kashmir purportedly for defense purposes. This story suggests that when people in urban areas were terrorized by the empire, they fled into the wilderness looking for a safe space. Rome depicted its cities as citadels of civilization and took great pride in them. As Rome extended its physical reach in the then known world, it systematically established cities in the new territories. Rome invested heavily in towns and cities constructing “baths, gymnasiums, theater, an amphitheater and perhaps a circus. While around 90 percent of the people were farmers who lived their entire lives in rural agricultural setting, only the tiny remainder who lived in cities defined and shaped Roman civilization and history.” 20 Therefore, Matthew’s suggestion that wilderness became a place of refuge for those escaping the city’s barbaric violence would have been paradoxical from a Roman point of view. It is an explicit challenge to Rome’s claims that it represented enlightenment and progress in civilization. HEROD IS HAUNTED The mention of erēmon topon (isolated place) is especially significant because that was where John had ministered (Mark 1:1–6; Matt 3:1–6). In having Jesus move to that location immediately after John’s execution, Matthew positions Jesus as a successor to John, fulfilling the latter’s prediction that one mightier than he would continue his work, albeit in a superior fashion (1:7–8). Indeed, Jesus continues the work of challenging Herod’s oppressive regime. In both Mark and Matthew, Herod Antipas himself confuses Jesus with John and assumes that John had risen from the dead; a deadman returns to haunt the living Herod who subjected many to death. This link between John and Jesus becomes clear already at the outset of Matthew when the narrator informs the readers that an emphasis on the society’s need to repent characterizes both their missions (3:1–5).

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Mark and Matthew present Jesus as a prophet who challenges the Roman Empire’s worldview and structures and attempts to ameliorate its unjust economic effects through his ministry. A key aspect of Jesus’s resistance to the empire pertains to its economic structures, which had a devastating impact on its subjects in colonies such as Galilee and the region of Syro-Phoenicia, especially on those at the margins of the society. 21 A COMPASSIONATE MEAL IN THE WILD The story of Herod’s banquet (Matt 14:1–12) and the first feeding narrative (Matt 14:13–21) together highlight the link between the empire and economic structures. If one juxtaposes these two texts, several pertinent details emerge. Herod Antipas’s banquet takes place in an affluent urban context, likely at his palace in the port city of Tiberias. The feeding story, by contrast, occurs in a solitary, deserted place (erēmos), as Matthew suggests on two occasions (14:13, 15). Herod’s banquet was attended exclusively by courtiers, officers, and leaders of Galilee, 22 but the beneficiaries of the feeding miracle were ordinary crowds from towns and villages. 23 Accordingly, the feeding narrative in chapter 6 sheds light on the extreme poverty, desperation, and powerlessness of the multitudes. The banquet story, on the other hand, highlights the opulence, privilege, and power of the ruling class. The stories in Matt 14:1–21 juxtapose the movement of resources in opposite directions. The banquet story (14:1–12) highlights centripetal movement of resources: taxes, tithes, and tributes that funded Herod’s lavish lifestyle were collected in rural Galilee and transferred to Tiberias, Herod’s seat of power, before a sizable portion of the revenues came to Rome. Often such centripetal movement of resources included luxury goods and essential commodities, with the result that, even as the elite in metropolitan capitals were hoarding goods, the very people who produced them were deprived of access to their produce. The empire thus created two contrasting realities— prosperity at the center and poverty at the margins—and justified them with the argument that prosperity at the top depended on depriving those at the margins of basic necessities. The economic structures that Rome has put in place facilitated centripetal movements of resources into its cities, especially Rome, while depriving people of the very goods they produced. As Aristides observed, produce is brought from every land and every sea, depending on what the seasons bring forth, and what is produced by all lands, rivers and lakes and the arts of Greeks and barbarians. If anyone wants to see all, he must either travel over the whole earth or come to this city. For what grows and is produced among peoples is necessarily always here, and here in abundance. 24

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All the produce waits to be bought by Rome, while those outside Rome and at the peripheries of the empire have little access to those goods (luxury products as well as essential goods). Amartya Sen, an economist of Indian origin, describes a similar situation pertaining to a major famine in West Bengal, Eastern part of India, in 1943, which resulted in the death of more than three million people. 25 British historians who have written about the famine generally concluded that the famine was brought about primarily because there was not enough food to feed all the people. Amid the intensity of famine, Winston Churchill offered a Malthusian view of the crisis when he suggested that the food crisis occurred because Indians had a propensity to breed like rabbits and to outstrip any available food supply. Sen witnessed the famine as a child in Bengal. In his 1990 book—Poverty and Famines—that won him the Nobel a few years later, he argued that there was more than enough food in the warehouses for everyone in the country at the time, but the famine was a direct result of the vast majority of the population lacking the ability to purchase even essential commodities. The imperial forces and the wealthy associated with the empire were hoarding food, both to ensure long-term food safety for their families but also with hope of selling them at exorbitant prices at an opportune time. The end result of such centripetal movement of resources was that the very people who produced essential commodities such as wheat and rice were deprived of access to what they produced. By contrast, the feeding story (Matt 14:13–21) highlights centrifugal movement of resources. Jesus blesses the food and gives it to his disciples, who then distribute it to leaders of the crowds; they in turn shared it with the people. As this episode illustrates, Matthew’s narrative introduces new economic paradigms such as downward and lateral distribution of resources, allowing rural Galileans to become recipients of essential commodities. There is yet another contrast between the stories of Herod’s banquet and Jesus’s feeding a multitude. While Herod took John’s life to maintain his oppressive regime, Jesus provided life-giving bread to many by subverting Herod’s economic structures. The two stories together present a critique of the imperial economic practices that adversely affected people in a colonized province as well as offer alternative economic paradigms. What makes this feeding story an unexpected event is that it took place in the wilderness, far from Roman cities (Rome’s seats of civilization). In yet another paradox, a banquet in a supposedly civilized city robbed people of their basic resources and even life itself, but wilderness became a location of compassion.

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CONCLUSION Matthew highlights an imperial paradox whereby a Roman city—supposedly the seat of civilizational values in the Roman propaganda—perpetuates a barbaric act while the wilderness becomes a place of refuge and a location of compassionate acts. In doing so, the gospel affirms and celebrates a location that was marginal to Rome’s imperial imagination but central to the evangelist’s worldview and ethos. The gospel calls attention to the extent to which people’s ideologies might be connected to, and even influenced by, the spaces they inhabit. Those living in, or moving closer to, marginal locations such as the wilderness have the capacity to be compassionate and a commitment to challenge the oppressive powers in ways those inhabiting the center cannot. What happens when those at the margins, as individuals or as communities, move closer to the center? Can one, hitherto from marginal spaces, now live in Roman imperial cities such as Tiberias and Rome and not be influenced by their oppressive ethos and values? Will he or she still have the capacity to resist the empire? As the Matthean community (who were likely located in the Syrian metropolis of Antioch), as well as the early Church in general, became increasingly urban and moved into metropolitan spaces, will Matthew’s audience be shaped by, and participate in, imperial values? Or, will they remain committed to challenging those values? NOTES 1. In his play Salome, Wilde (1893) suggests that Salome desired John the Baptist sexually but decided to have him killed when he spurned her. The play ends with Salome kissing John’s severed head. 2. Matthew also suggests that it was on account of moral issues that John was executed (John had criticized Herod’s immoral marriage). Luke refers to John’s death in passing but offers no details about how it occurred (Matt 14:3–12; Luke 9:7–9). 3. Josephus writes about the abrupt manner in which Herod Antipas divorced his first wife Phasaelis, the daughter of King Aretas IV, in order to marry Herodias and the resultant political fallout. Aretas IV declared a war on Herod and inflicted a humiliating defeat. See Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 18, 109–18. 4. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 18, 109–18. 5. Richard Horsley, Covenant Economics: A Biblical Vision of Justice for All (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 115–17. 6. Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 57–58. 7. R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 5–7. 8. James D. Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 134. 9. The gospel writers, as well as Josephus, suggest that John had a powerful influence on the people in Galilee. 10. Matthew’s account of the story reinterprets the reason for John’s death but also deflects attention from Herod by suggesting that Herodias and her daughter were the instigators of the murder (Matt 14:3–12).

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11. Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire,” paper presented at SOAS as Globalisation Lectures, The University of London, (October 29, 2008). 12. This sculpture may be viewed at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Category:Gemma_Augustea#/media/File:EB1911_Roman_Art_-_Gemma_Augustea.jpg. 13. Tonio Holscher, The Language of Images in Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 41–44. 14. Kurt A. Raaflaub and Mark Toher, Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 338–39. 15. The scene depicted in the lower cameo supposedly occurs in places such as Germany and France. 16. In Prima Porta Augustus, another sculpture commissioned during Augustus’s reign, the body of Augustus fluctuates between being naked and being clothed, and symbolically between being divine and being human. He is depicted as being barefoot in the same fashion most divine figures were portrayed during that time. At his right leg is a cupid figure who descended from Venus, the goddess of love. His breastplate features images of several divine figures, again sending a message that Augustus and his rule are divinely sanctioned. Needless to say, one can draw several parallels to modern American politics, but the scope of this chapter does not allow for such a detour. 17. This image may be viewed at https://1857india.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/devils-windthe-british-retribution/#jp-carousel-138. See also Hans Leander, Discourses of Empire: The Gospel of Mark from a Postcolonial Perspective (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013), 28. 18. On a slightly different note, the Bible in the bottom left corner of the image suggests that it was likely done with the blessings of the empire in order to suggest that the British conquest of India was justified by the Bible. The British also employed—directly or indirectly—several ministers to offer biblical and theological justification for its oppressive rule in India. William Arnot, a Scottish minister, from the nineteenth century who spent much of his life in India, is one such example. William Arnot’s The Parables of Our Lord (2015) is one of numerous examples of British attempts to provide biblical justification for the British colonial project in India. 19. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 170. 20. Gregory Aldrete, Daily Life in the Roman City: Rome, Pompeii and Ostea (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 2–3. 21. Horsley, Covenant Economics, 81–90. 22. Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006), 49. 23. Matthew’s gospel frequently employs the term “crowd” to refer to those at the socioeconomic margins of the society. 24. Cited in Harry O. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 181. 25. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 53–80.

Chapter Six

Cornelius the Centurion Meets the Ethiopian Eunuch in a Jeepney Revelation Enriques Velunta

In Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian cohort, as it was called. (Acts 10:1) This war is the kingdom of God coming . . . the sunrise of a better day for the Philippines. With Christ in his heart, the New Testament in his pocket, “Look up and lift up” [badge of Methodist Youth League] on his shirt, and forty rounds of ammunition in his belt, we have sent our first missionary in the family. 1

I agree with Jane Schaberg that Luke is a dangerous piece of literature. 2 Together with Acts, Luke helps create, rationalize, legitimize, and perpetuate the ideology of the imperial soldier as a model of Christianity. The presentation of five centurions in Luke-Acts, especially Cornelius, aimed at convincing readers that, despite the fact that the empire executed Jesus, imperial officers made the best Christians. Having these officers converted was a big step toward having a Christian empire. Presupposing that imperialism—aside from its many tentacles—is also a textual project, I will selectively engage the Lukan narratives with questions I adopt from Musa Dube: (1) Does the text have an explicit stance for or against the political imperialism of its time? (2) Does the text encourage and justify travel to distant and inhabited lands? (3) How does the text construct difference: Is there dialogue and liberating interdependence, or condemnation and replacement of all that is foreign? (4) Does the text employ representations (gender, divine, etc.) to construct relationships of subordination and domination? 3

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CENTURIONS Chan-Hie Kim summarized the questions interpreters usually raise concerning Acts 10: Was the story historical, a fabrication or something in-between? Was Luke’s intention to show that Jerusalem was the center of the Gentile mission? Was Luke really focusing on Peter’s “conversion” rather than on Cornelius’s? 4 Almost everyone whose work I consulted identify with Cornelius as the ostracized underdog. Peter was the hero who comes to the underdog’s aid and the Judaizers were sketched as villains who eventually changed their ways, and everyone lives happily ever after. Two empires meet; and curiously enough, they are pleased with each other. Kayama identifies the Judaizers as present-day Christians who discriminate against the Japanese “Burakumin,” the over three million outcasts who are considered unclean or polluted. Cornelius represents the Burakumin. 5 Kim, on the other hand, identifies the Judaizers as present-day WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) communities who discriminate against present-day Corneliuses, the Asian immigrants. 6 Both interpretations do not take into account the postcolonial argument that Cornelius was nowhere near being an outcast, but an agent, no, the agent, of the empire. Reading Cornelius—and the other centurions in Luke-Acts—against the backdrop of imperial/colonial dynamics unmasks Lukan politics as anti-Jewish, anti-women, racist, and pro-empire. In contemporary terms, I do not believe that an officer of an occupying nation (like a captain in the Israeli Defense Force at the Bethlehem checkpoint) can be considered an outcast or a victim of discrimination in Palestine. In the same breath, I do not believe that a Navy SEAL officer representing “Big Brother” in many of the United States’ former colonies feels discriminated among his “little brown brothers.” How does one go about unmasking the text’s imperialist agenda? Let us begin with Caesarea. Caesarea Maritima was the realization of Herod’s dream. The prefects resided in the city. Christianity may have come to Caesarea through Philip (Acts 8:40), or Peter (10:1–11:18), or even Paul (9:30, 18:22, 21:8). But Luke’s devoting over a chapter in describing Peter’s encounter with Cornelius indicates that Christianity came to Caesarea via the centurion’s conversion. Adding to this Lukan construct of “an-imperialagent-converting-an-imperial-city” is the conversion of the proconsul, Sergius Paulus in Acts 13:12. The splendor of Caesarea and the prosperity of its harbor reflect the wealth and lifestyle of the Herodians and upper class of first-century Palestine. There was a significant gap between the extreme affluence of the rich versus the rest of the population. The same contrast probably characterized urban centers such as Ptolemais, Sepphoris, Tiberias, Sebaste, Jericho, and

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Jerusalem’s Upper City. The city, though, was the capital of Roman Palestine and thus became the first target of the Jewish nationalists in the first revolt against the empire in 66 CE. It was there that the Roman military forces were based and administered so that the name, the culture, the power base in Caesarea symbolized and embodied for the Jews in Palestine the cultural, economic, and political dominance by the foreign power over the land they considered God’s gift. 7 How about the Italian cohort? In their commentaries on Acts, Johnson and Barrett agree that this tenth of a legion (600 soldiers who may or may not have been Italian citizens) was never stationed anywhere near Judea between 6–66 CE. 8 There is, however, inscriptional evidence for the presence of the cohort (II Italica ciuium Romanorum) in Syria in 69 CE. This does not mean, though, that there weren’t other imperial forces stationed there. It was, after all, a stratopedon, an army camp. The basic battlefield unit of the Roman Army was the century, originally composed of one hundred men, led by centurions. Most centuries had less than the full number of troops and usually contained between eighty and one hundred men, and sometimes even less. There were different grades of centurions. Some were men who had only been in the army a few years and whose rank were roughly equivalent to a sergeant. Others were twenty year or more veterans and might be likened to a commissioned or staff officer in today’s US or British army. Bruce reminds us that centurions were the backbone of the Roman legions. He quotes Polybius (Hist 6.24) who described their character thus: “Centurions are desired not to be bold and adventurous so much as good leaders, of steady and prudent mind, not prone to take offensive or start fighting wantonly, but able when overwhelmed and hard pressed to stand fast and die at their post.” 9 Centurions represented the real power that was once ancient Rome, and were the epitome of Rome’s armed peacekeepers. Centurions received very high pay, up to fifteen to twenty times higher than common soldiers or legionaries, and, as they rose to seniority in the legion, became persons of considerable influence. The conditions of service varied from period to period during the empire. Augustus fixed the legionary’s service at sixteen successive years. Upon honorable discharge, the veteran received a grant of land in one of the colonies or chartered towns established for this purpose. By 6 CE, the period of service stood at twenty years, with an additional grant of money at discharge. The Flavian emperors modified this again, fixing the length of service at twenty-five years. The pay for the legionary under Augustus was 900 sesterces (about 225 denarii) in three installments each year. Domitian increased the total to 1,200 (about 300 denarii) a year, paid quarterly. A lump payment was made when a new emperor was enthroned, with about one-half of the amount going into “savings.” Centurions, on the average, received about 20,000 sesterces

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(5,000 denarii). It is difficult to interpret these amounts in modern economic terms, but there is evidence that the legionary could live reasonably well on two-thirds of his pay. Using corn as a standard, 60 modii would keep him fed for a year (a modius usually cost one denarius). Thus, he had sufficient corn per week for just over a day’s pay, or under Domitian, a fifth of his pay would have gone to corn. Then we come to Cornelius. The name “Cornelius” was that of a patrician (noble, aristocrat) family in Rome and was borne by many of the family and its descendants. In 82 BCE, L. Cornelius Sulla freed ten thousand slaves who entered his gens and used the name Cornelius. Kee concludes that Cornelius’s credentials as an agent of Roman power and presence are impeccable. 10 Whether he was from a noble family or he started from scratch— whether he was still active or already retired—both text and data show that he was well-off, influential, and popular. He was, therefore, someone with whom most people would not mess. This sketch of Cornelius is nowhere near the portrait of the “underdog” Gentile many have painted of him. 11 As a centurion he was in charge of implementing training, discipline, and organization, and was an expert in gamesmanship, which did not involve the “fanatic’s thirst for discipline through domination but the professional’s finely honed rationality of organizational control via manipulation.” 12 Legionary coins (your ancient mass propaganda machinery) not only provide support to our sketch but also offer portraits of conquered peoples as depicted by the empire, haunting reminders from antiquity of what happens to those who dare defy Rome. Beck argues that Roman justice was of no help to the majority of people in Israel. 13 There was no Roman justice when Legionnaires swept through narrow streets and crowded marketplaces on their horses, trampling on babies, children, and aged people who could not get out of their way. There was no Roman justice when soldiers (in violation of military regulations) seized young Jewish women, raped them, and retained those whom they wished for their own use. There was no Roman justice when young Jews who attempted violent retaliation were caught, tortured, and crucified. There was no Roman justice for Jewish religious and political leaders who encouraged within the oppressed the hope that soon they would be free from Roman oppression. When their activity became known to the oppressive structures, they were seized, tortured, and crucified together with captured guerilla fighters as “rulers of Jews” and enemies of the State. LUKAN CONSTRUCTIONS OF EMPIRE There are five centurions in Luke-Acts (compared to the two in Matthew and one in Mark). Luke employs each one to soften, if not eradicate, the specter

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of Jesus’s execution under Rome. The first one’s faith gets Jesus’s highest praise (Luke 7:1ff.), the second declares him innocent at the crucifixion (Luke 23:47), the third is Peter’s Cornelius (Acts 10:1ff.), the fourth saves Paul from a flogging (Acts 22:25ff.), and the fifth is Paul’s Julius (Acts 27:1ff.). Each of Luke-Acts’ male heroes has, at least, a centurion. So by the time Luke’s reader gets to meet the third centurion, the first named in LukeActs, the reader has been convinced, despite what happened to Jesus, that this centurion is one of the good guys. Along the way, in Stephen’s speech (Acts 7:17–22), Luke offers a domesticated capsule of the Exodus saga presenting the Egyptian Empire in a good light ordering the Israelites to abandon their infants (Acts 7:19) instead of throwing them into the Nile (Exod 1:22). Moses is adopted into the Pharaoh’s family and learns the wisdom of the “empire” (Acts 7:21–22). Readers encounter a nice Pilate, who declares Jesus’s innocence three times (!), and then meet a believing proconsul in Sergius Paulus. Luke creatively locates his centurion narratives amid situations of unbelief, stubbornness, or crises. The centurion’s faith in Luke 7 is a stark contrast to the unfaith of the people in Nazareth (Luke 4:22), the tentativeness of the fishing disciples (Luke 5:5), the apparent disobedience of the healed leper (Luke 5:14), the sarcasm of the crowd (Luke 5:21), the obvious need of instruction of the disciples that necessitated the sermon on the plain (Luke 6). After the centurion’s account comes the probing, tentative questions from John the Baptist (Luke 7:18). What Luke has done is offer readers a “conversion” experience for Jesus who sees the centurion’s authoritative way as the right way of doing things, of effecting change. Later, in Luke 22:36, Jesus, probably thinking like a centurion, makes sure that they are armed with swords before they leave for the Mount of Olives. There are no passages in Mark, Matthew, or John that parallel this sword-wielding scenario. The centurion at the cross declares Jesus innocent. The narrative is right in the middle of disappointing sketches about Jesus’s followers: Satan’s possession of Judas (22:3), the disciples’ argument over greatness (22:24), the disciples falling asleep (22:45), Peter’s denial (22:54), and even the male disciples’ unbelief regarding the resurrection (24:1). How does Luke deal with this one who actually leads the crucifixion detail? He has him do what Pilate did, declare Jesus’s innocence thereby effectively passing the blame for the execution from the empire to the Jews. This “blame the Jews” theme is a recurring thread in the book of Acts, especially in Peter’s speeches (Acts 2:36, 3:15, 4:11, 10:39, 13:28). For Beck, Luke’s project had two audiences: Roman authorities (who had to be persuaded that Christianity was no threat) and Christians (who had to be persuaded to adjust their behavior in order to reduce conflict with Roman authorities). 14 Something radical was needed to lessen pressure on his fellow

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believers. If presenting the Jews as villains will help ease off Roman oppression, then Jews will have to serve as villains. The end justified the means for Luke. Thus, Luke picks the centurion, icon of imperial rule, as friends of the icons of Christianity. The centurion and the tribune episode in Acts 22:24 (also in 21:31) stands at the center of attempts to murder Paul (21:30, 23:12). A similar guardianangel status is conferred on Julius (of the Emperor’s elite cohort) who makes sure that the Christian message and its messenger is brought safely to Rome. The text describes him as kind (27:3); one who made sure that the trip to the heart of the empire went on smoothly (27:6); and one who defended Paul against soldiers who were planning to kill him (27:43). In contrast to one centurion who crucifies Jesus—who may have done it under duress—Luke offers two centurions who save Paul. And then, there is Cornelius. PETER’S CENTURION Given the evangelist’s expansionist agenda in Acts 1:8 and his portrayal of centurions so far, is there any choice other than Cornelius to represent the first step toward the conversion of the empire? The Cornelius pericope, similar to accounts of the other centurions, is right in the middle of crisis narratives. The work among the Jews, Peter’s Jesus-killers, was one of diminishing returns (Acts 2:41, 4:1ff., 5:17, 6:1, 7:57ff.). The work among the Samaritans was handled by deacons who lacked the power to offer the Spirit (8:16). The Holy Spirit, according to Luke, turns toward Rome. To take Caesarea was the first step toward taking Rome. To have Christian centurions was the first step toward having a Christian emperor seeing that they declared Vespasian emperor in Caesarea and they also declared Constantine emperor. Haenchen suggested that Luke wants to resolve the conflict over the Pauline mission by the recollection of the Cornelius pericope. Luke wants his readers to know that the “idea” of the Gentile mission came not from Paul nor from Peter but from God. 15 This mission was fulfilled with the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, and the work among the Samaritans (as non-Jews). The mission to the Jews and the Gentiles has so far been disappointing. This narrative is aimed to persuade the reader that God received Cornelius’s offerings as a memorial (Acts 10:4) and has, therefore, identified the real locus of mission. The mission is not about Gentiles, in general, but a particular kind of Gentile, the imperial one. Acts 10 begins with the description that Cornelius and his household were God-fearers. Why then were the only ones invited his relatives and close friends (Acts 10:24)? Of the four “household” conversion scenes in Acts (the others being Lydia’s, the jailer’s, and Crispus’s) it is only in this pericope

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that oikos is replaced by “relatives and intimate friends” (cf. Acts 16:15, 31–34; 18:8 with 10:2, 24). The Jesus-Martha encounter in Luke 10:38–42 shows Luke’s imperial mimicry. The passage justifies the taking over of another’s “household.” Difference is constructed by condemnation and replacement of what is “foreign.” The relationships are not mutual; rather, they are about domination and subordination. Two ministers—a woman (Martha) and a man (Jesus)— upon the invitation of the former meet in her home but the latter, instead of being a guest, takes over the woman’s house! Spanish and American missionaries followed a similar script in the Philippines when they were welcomed by babaylan (women priestesses) into their communities. 16 What came after was—and still is—the systematic subjugation and domestication of the “wild” babaylananes. The householders, the insiders, have become squatters, outsiders, in their own land. Diakoneo, a Lukan motif, which is usually translated “to minister” when men are involved and “to serve” when women are involved, characterize both Jesus’s (Luke 22:27) and Martha’s (Luke 10:40) ministries. Martha addresses Jesus directly as an equal (10:40) but Jesus describes her service as “worried and distracted by many things” (10:41). Jesus’s ministry, on the other hand, is the better choice and Mary, Martha’s sister, has chosen wisely (10:42). 17 Can one become Christian and remain an agent of the empire, keeper of the Pax Romana? Can one claim Jesus is Lord and Caesar is Lord at the same time? Luke seems to affirm that imperial officers turned Christian was the way to making the empire Christian. Luke stamps God’s seal of approval, the Holy Spirit, on the epitome, the incarnation of the empire. Luke-Acts records how the Holy Spirit brought Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem and then the church from Jerusalem to Rome. The Holy Spirit moved headquarters from Jerusalem to Rome. Compare the final sentences of the twin volumes: They . . . returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were constantly in the temple blessing God. (Luke 24:52–53) He [Paul] lived there [under house arrest in Rome] two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance (Acts 28:30–31).

The climax of Luke’s gospel is not the believers and the church in Jerusalem but Paul and the church in Rome. In Acts, Luke ignores what happened to Paul, who was on imperial trial since Acts 21. We never hear that Paul was executed under Nero, because it is not his death in Rome but his presence there that matters. The final image is of the kingdom of God proclaimed

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freely and boldly in the very heart of the Roman Empire and, again, lest we forget, Luke conscripted five centurions to make this project possible. God has, for Luke, turned God’s face away from Israel to Rome. Luke would have affirmed this description of the imperial banquet celebrating the Council of Nicea’s conclusion: Detachments of the body-guard and troops surrounded the entrance of the palace with drawn swords, and through the midst of them the men of God proceeded without fear into the innermost of the Imperial apartments, in which some were the Emperor’s companions at table, while others reclined on couches arranged on either side. One might have thought that a picture of Christ’s kingdom was thus shadowed forth, and a dream rather than reality. 18

PETER’S CONVERSION Laura Donaldson discusses R. S. Sugirtharajah’s postcolonial project as involving the quest for, or the conjuring up of, protesting voices in the text. 19 So, the parable of the tenants in the synoptic tradition, for instance, is read from the owner’s perspective. 20 When the audience learns that the owner plans to destroy the tenants and lease the land to others, they react “Heaven forbid!” (Luke 20:16)—an expression of shock because they believe that they are the heirs of YHWH’s promise. Interpreters rarely focus on the parable’s actual and textual audience. Postcolonial criticism attempts to bring to the front marginal elements in the texts, and thus in the process, challenges and subverts the traditional meaning. 21 I offer to read the Cornelius-Peter encounter in the light of what we now know about centurions, empires, and colonies, and what we know about Peter from Paul’s writings. Paul in Gal 2:7–8 states that he had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised while Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised. In verses 11–14 Paul rebukes Peter for his hypocrisy for being afraid of the circumcision faction. Paul’s Peter does not look like Luke’s Peter in Acts. (Similarly, Paul in Luke does not look like Paul in Paul’s writings.) The Lord, through an angel, appears to Cornelius in broad daylight and gives him his orders. The orders read like a detailed surveillance report: the dossier is about Peter (that he had a small fishing operation but was now dependent on others for financial support), his aliases, where he is presently staying (signifying that he is a moving target and has no permanent address). Hengel presents Peter as the “odd-man out.” 22 He was somewhere between the Judaists and the Hellenists, and Acts shows him moving around a bit. The dossier offers details of his present location (where it is, who owns it, and for what the domicile is used). Peter presented a most interesting subject for an imperial officer. Whether Cornelius was still active or not, it did not

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matter. Soldiers never retire. He dispatches two of his slaves and a military escort to “invite” Peter to his home. The representatives travel to Joppa and bring Peter back (who was cautious enough to have brought six companions; Acts 11:12). Luke’s Peter is impressed with Cornelius. I think his visit and his vision convinced him that bringing the gospel to the circumcised wasn’t worth it. Recall that Peter was staying with Simon the tanner. His vision on the roof may simply have been induced by pangs of hunger and rising smoke (which he saw as a sheet?) of the cooking below of whatever remained of the fourfooted animals, reptiles, or birds that the tannery required. And then he gets invited to a party hosted by Cornelius who had everything—with no restrictions. Peter is converted. Then he goes to persuade his brothers and sisters in Jerusalem. And, according to Luke, they converted too. To the contrary, Cornelius did not need conversion. The vision, Peter’s change of heart, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit (on select Gentiles) were formulations to signify heaven’s imprimatur on the centurion’s way of life. What Luke offers us is the model Christian, the imperial officer. And the path toward a Christian empire. History shows us that Luke was right! What we have in Luke-Acts is a classic example of collaboration among the circles of the colonized. In the Philippines, we use the term makapili to describe those whose minds are so colonized that they despise their own and worship their colonial masters. Imperialism persists in all its forms because it actively adopts structural strategies of assimilation to succeed. Although colonizing texts come from colonizers, some also arise from the colonized. Luke-Acts is one example. Matthew is another. Depending on interest groups and stages of imperial domination, the colonized can condone its oppressors, cooperate with them, or totally reject them. Collaboration among circles of the colonized is unavoidable. 23 The imperialist strategy of “control-at-a-distance” engages the learned upper class (Theophilus, Luke, and his ilk) to become its ruling representatives, thus effectively concealing the face of the imperial oppressor among the colonized. 24 What is worse is the villain who has become the hero, like that captain of the Israeli Defense Force at the Bethlehem checkpoint. And that Navy SEAL officer who serves as the most powerful symbol of Pax Americana today. ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS If Americans had never committed genocide against the Indians; if they had never incited wars of annihilation between the native peoples of the land, if there had never been a Trail of Tears; if America had never organized and commercialized the kidnapping and sale into slavery of a gentle and defenseless African people; if it had never developed the most widespread, brutal, exploitative system of slavery the world has ever known; if it had never

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Each of these harrowing events and its unspeakable horrors were led by Christian centurions—Andrew Jackson, George Armstrong Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Arthur and Douglas MacArthur, Harry Truman; the list goes on. Most of these men went to church regularly. They read their Bibles and prayed every day. They gave to charity. They were responsible for the deaths of so many people. Almost all current conflicts in the world today involves the United States and its Christian centurions. On the other hand, for Jesus, the model disciple was the poorest of the poor, the ones whose only hope was God. Fisher-folk. But for the authors of Luke-Acts and Matthew, the model disciple was literate, landed, and welltravelled. An officer in the Roman Army. FROM JEEPS INTO JEEPNEYS As I have argued, Luke-Acts help create, rationalize, legitimize, and perpetuate the ideology of the imperial soldier as a model of Christianity. Where do we go from here? How does one decolonize an imperializing text? How does one read Luke-Acts without perpetuating the self-serving paradigm of constructing one group, one race, one gender, one people as superior to another? When America claims privilege as the new Israel, how does a people, pacified by the veterans of the genocide of native peoples, read the Bible? I suggest reading the Bible inside a jeepney. 26 One begins with one’s view of the Bible. Traditional roles of Scripture are problematic, when they involve submission to the text, or more exactly, defining the authority of the text in terms of moral prescriptions or visions (ideologies, religious views, etc.) that it posits or carries. Many Asian Bible interpreters—mimicking their Western teachers—begin with the theological affirmation, explicit or not, that the Bible is “God’s Word” and that it offers access to the complete and final revelation of the One True God, Jesus Christ. Jeepney hermeneutics imagines the Bible as an American military jeep, a sword, an imperializing text—a dangerous text, as demonstrated throughout history by the many horrendous crimes committed in its name, especially among peoples and nations constructed as “Canaanites.”

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Jeepney hermeneutics is about appropriating jeeps. The US Army, back in 1940, required an all-terrain reconnaissance, go-anywhere vehicle that seated three and had a mount for a 30-caliber machine gun. Filipinos have turned this military vehicle into a public utility vehicle, a sort of mini-bus that can accommodate twenty or more people. Some look at a jeepney and call it Frankenstein’s monster. And others who see it as a “Filipino home on wheels,” complete with an altar. The military jeep was, and still is, a sort of imperializing text. A jeepney resists this text. The centurion is to Luke-Acts as the 30-caliber machine gun mount is to the military jeep. To read Luke-Acts inside a jeepney is to celebrate the fact that the first thing Filipinos did in their transformation of the military jeep was to rid it of that machine gun mount. To read Luke-Acts inside a jeepney is to affirm the reality that weapons of mass destruction (military jeeps) can be transformed into Filipino homes on wheels (public utility jeepneys). To read Luke-Acts inside a jeepney is to argue that a three-seater military vehicle, when its boundaries and walls are stretched and transgressed, can be transformed into an indigenous mass transport system that can accommodate twenty people or more. To read Luke-Acts inside a jeepney is to remove our gaze from the centurion, the model Christian in the narrative, and focus on someone else (such as the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26–39). Using their color-coding method, the Jesus Seminar designate Matt 19:12 as an authentic Jesus saying. 27 It is one of the most difficult passages in the gospels. One can read it as a resistance discourse against patriarchy and its standards of maleness, virility, family, and marriage. It can also be read as a celebration of being single and thus unattached and better equipped to minister. It can and has been interpreted as a call to the celibate life. Some, like Origen, read it as a call to castration. The eunuch of Matthew 19:12 has long been viewed as a symbol of chastity and celibacy. However, a study of ancient perspectives on eunuchs reveals a highly sexed and morally dubious “third type of human” embodying the worst fears of masculine vulnerability and sexual transgression. Many early Christians interpreted Jesus’ instruction literally, imitating their counterparts in other religious traditions who employed castration as an expression of religious devotion. This created difficulties for certain church leaders concerned with appealing to (aristocratic) male converts, and the effort to transform the eunuch into a symbol of masculine askesis was never an easy one. . . . Fundamental to understanding Matthew 19:12 is the explicit rejection of the heterosexist binary paradigm for understanding the role and importance of sex, sexuality and sexed identity in the “kingdom of heaven.” 28

That the eunuch was treated as a “third type of human” in antiquity opens up new ways of reading Jesus’s hard saying in Matthew and by extension, LukeActs, which is the only other gospel to have such character. Eunuchs were

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not male. Eunuchs were not female. Appealing to structural criticism’s semiotic square with its binary opposites of A’s and B’s and Non-A’s and NonB’s, a eunuch is not an A, not a B, but both Non-A and Non-B. A eunuch was not only a threat to phallocentric patriarchy but was also a source of sex-gender confusion in a predominantly hetero-normative society. Taking this perspective would undermine and transgress the centuries-old heterosexist readings of the Bible. Moreover, since the saying most probably comes from the historical Jesus, one may further argue that sex-gender transgression is a Jesus-sanctioned identity practice. Deuteronomy 23:1 excluded eunuchs from the temple. The inclusion of the eunuch pericope in Acts carries several very powerful messages. First, the first Gentile Christian was gay. 29 Second, this Christian did not only come from a sexual minority, he was from a different nationality, from a different race. He was black. 30 One of my former students from Africa once remarked, “The Spirit is racist in Acts. The Spirit snatches Philip from my fellow African then gives the gift of speaking in tongues to white folk, Cornelius and his friends.” The Spirit does snatch Philip from the Ethiopian eunuch, but after the eunuch’s baptism. However one reads the passage, he was the first Gentile Christian. And the end of verse 39 reads, “he went on his way rejoicing.” In other words, this gay black man, using contemporary evangelistic lingo, was saved. Good news is always relative. Interpretation is always particular and perspectival. There is always more than one way of reading. Or knowing. Actually, there are legion. One can read Luke-Acts like a jeep. And focus on centurions. Especially Cornelius. Or one can choose to read it like a jeepney. And celebrate the message and the challenge of the Ethiopian eunuch. Especially today. NOTES 1. William Gallogly Moorehead, Outlines Studies in Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2015), 155. 2. Jane Schaberg, “Luke” in The Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol Newson and Sharon Ringe, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 275. 3. Musa Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Atlanta: Chalice Press, 2000), 129. 4. Chan Hie Kim, “Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States,” in Reading from this Place, edited by Fernando Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 165. 5. Hisao Kayama, “The Cornelius Story in the Japanese Cultural Context,” in Voices from the Margins: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, edited by R. S. Sugirtharajah (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2016), 186. 6. Kim, “Social Location and Biblical Interpretation,” 165. 7. Howard Clark Kee, Understanding the New Testament (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1993), 51.

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8. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Acts of the Apostles (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1992); C. K. Barrett, The Acts of the Apostles: A Shorter Commentary (London: T & T Clark, 2002). 9. F. F. Bruce, The Book of Acts: New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988). 10. Kee, Understanding the New Testament, 51. 11. In the same breath, the sketch we get of Pontius Pilate from extra-biblical sources is nowhere near the portrait of the nice guy Pilate of the New Testament, Luke’s especially. 12. Kenneth Boulding, What is the Nature of Man? Images of Man in our American Culture (Christian Education Press, 1959), 15. 13. William Ernest Beck, Acts of the Apostles (Manila: Mass Market, 1965), 32. 14. Beck, Acts of the Apostles, 154–55. 15. Ernst Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1971), 362. 16. See Melinda Grace Aoanan (ed), Babaylan: Feminist Articulations and Expressions, Volume 2 (Cavite: Union Theological Seminary, 2009). 17. Luke keeps people in their places, especially women. Women take center stage in the first two chapters of Luke (with Mary and Elizabeth) then things go downhill from there. Women become men’s support system (Luke 8:1–3, Acts 16:11–15). Women are supposed to sit quietly and listen (Luke 10:38–42). When they do get to bear good news, their glad tidings are considered idle talk (Luke 24:9–11). 18. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 424. 19. Laura Donaldson (ed.), Postcolonialism and Scriptural Reading (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1996), 5. 20. Cf. William Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994). 21. Cf. Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Religious and Socio-Political Reading (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000). 22. Martin Hengel, Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), 92. 23. Musa Dube, “Toward a Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible,” Semeia 78 (1997): 14–15. 24. Ibid., 15. 25. Nelson Peery, Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary (New York: New Press, 1994). 26. See Daniel Patte, Justin Ukpong, Monya Stubbs, and Revelation Velunta, The Gospel of Matthew: A Contextual Introduction for Group Study (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003). 27. Robert Funk, Roy Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993). 28. J. David Hester, Eunuchs and the Post-Gender Jesus (California: Center for Hermeneutics and Rhetorics, n.d.). 29. John J. McNeill, Freedom, Glorious Freedom: The Spiritual Journey to the Fullness of Life for Gays, Lesbians, and Everybody Else (Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2010). 30. Jack Rogers, Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009).

Chapter Seven

The Oppressor Has Ceased Rogelio Dario Barolin

We find in the Bible different ways to deal with the realities of death and oppression that empires bring: from cooperation to negotiation and opposition. In this chapter, I present two biblical mechanisms for coping with the death dealings of empires, and an Uruguayan alternative. First, the literary genre of lamentation is a meaningful way to uncover the pain and suffering brought by empire, with the book of Lamentation as the main source. Second, I work on the satiric use of lamentation as a way to resist the empire’s narrative of glory and oppression. In this case, I focus on the parody of Isaiah 14:4b–21. Then, in a third moment, I present the Uruguayan “Murga” as a contemporary artistic expression of resistance using the similar technique of satire. Nowadays, theological and pastoral practices are restricted to a rational discourse and creative expressions such as lamentations and satire are underestimated and even ignored. This chapter argues that it is necessary to rediscover the powerful experiences of lamentation and satire in order to resist empire and to nourish hope, as well as discover alternatives for God’s people. LAMENTATION Our world is in deep mourning. Too many people suffer, too many people mourn but deaf and blind famine keep growing and war has new and enthusiastic players. Climate disasters arrive to new places or hit stronger in already known ones. However, the world keeps moving in the same direction. The suffering of people outside of the mainstream does not seem to matter. It happens but is not counted. It is watched but not seen. It is announced but not heard. The central world ignores the suffering, playing it down or 73

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simply denying it. However, people cry to survive, tell to heal, hug to overcome and hope to live again. Companionship is necessary in order to survive suffering and to change the structure of oppression and pain. Companionship starts when outcry is heard, and oppression is seen. It is necessary then, to create spaces where pain can be heard and noticed. And there is no better biblical example of doing that than the book of Lamentations. Sadly, the liturgical calendar of many churches in the Oikoumene does not offer an opportunity to cry and realize that not everything is all right. The laments are skipped or cut down. The traditional liturgy in the Reform tradition does not include a moment of lamentation. Praise, thanksgiving, intercession, and confession are there, but no room for lamentation. 1 In contrast, lamentations are strong in the Bible. Laments move God (see Exod 2:25 and Rev 6:10). In this context, I call attention to the book of Lamentations, whose construction, voices, and words can help our task to resist and overcome death and suffering caused by empire. Book of Lamentations The book of Lamentations is a collection of poems around the destruction of the city of Jerusalem and the suffering, death, and grief of its population. The themes and situations described fit well with the massive suffering brought by the siege and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire in 587 BCE. The link of the book of Lamentations with this event has literary consistency and the context suits well with the book. 2 Tradition linked this book with Jeremiah, probably because of the influence of 2 Chr 35:25, and the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. In the LXX is this introduction to the book: “And it happened, after Israel was taken captive and Ierousalem was laid waste, Ieremias sat weeping and gave this lament over Ierousalem.” 3 Along that line, the Jewish tradition reads Lamentations as part of the megillot, to remember the destruction of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar first and later by Vespasian (70 BCE). Suffering Voices Lamentations for the destruction of a city or a sanctuary are well attested in ancient Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, and biblical texts, with variants of specific motives. 4 They also have a certain relationship with personal dirges in the Old Testament. It is likely that in Lamentations are the voices of survivors of this catastrophe and especially those that suffered most: women, children, elderly (2:10–12, 21). Mercedes Garcia Bachmman links this specific genre to women: “where surely some women predominate was in the office of singers, reciters and musicians, including the specialization of mourners (or

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grievers).” 5 An example of this is found in Jer 9:17–19 (see also 2 Sam 1:24; Eze 32:16): Thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider, and call for the mourning women to come; send for the skilled women to come; let them quickly raise a dirge over us, so that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids flow with water. For a sound of wailing is heard from Zion: “How we are ruined! We are utterly shamed, because we have left the land, because they have cast down our dwellings.” 6

In Lamentations we find voices talking about women as well as the voices of women themselves, especially in chapters 1, 2, and 4, where “Lady Jerusalem” laments. No Longer Voiceless There are several aspects of voice and silence in Lamentations. First, “The voice is the self-reemerging of the subject.” 7 A lump in the throat is the first impact of suffering and pain. Words do not come up, they remain inside. We cry, with incomprehensible sounds, but not words. When we are able to speak, even incoherently, we start the process to act upon what had happened. Sometimes, after a traumatic experience it is necessary to talk through the healing process. So speaking after a catastrophe is a huge moment for those in pain, a big step toward hope. In Lamentations we find the voice of the narrator, the voices of the city personified by a woman (1:12–22; 2:21–22), the voices of a survivor (3:1–39) and the voices of the community (3:40–43; 5:1–20). The victims speak by themselves. The narrator gives voice to those that otherwise will be voiceless and silenced. Their pain and suffering did matter and must be heard. The audience could recognize their own voice there, and those that are still voiceless may find in Lamentations a way to speak up. Second, “the multiple voices of Lamentations reach no unanimity about the causes of the tragedy or how to respond to it.” 8 The narrator blames the city for its sins (1:1–11), the city claims mercy and seeks revenge (1:12–22), the narrator accuses God of punishing Jerusalem (2:1–20), the survivor affirms God’s sovereignty and reassures hope in God’s mercy (3:25–39), the community however claims that it returned to God but was not heard (3:40–42). The different voices, sometimes in tension, give the book a sense of authenticity. The narrator did not censor, but allowed the contradictory

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feelings of despair and trust, justice and injustice, pain and revenge. The reader could finish the book with uncertainty about the causes and the future but with a clear picture of the unbearable suffering and the grief of the people. Third, “God’s voice is missing.” 9 As readers move along the poems, they are able to hear different voices but not the voice of God (which is quoted once by the “survivor” in 3:57). In the book of Job, once God speaks Job stops arguing and moves to praise. In the book of Lamentations, God’s silence allows the characters to speak their suffering, even to accuse God and, at the same time, to demand God’s mercy. The reader may finish the book missing the voice of God. In this way, it opens up the future, especially when the final verse of the book is considered: “unless you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure” (5:22). The book finishes by addressing God with a prayer telling that they were forgotten and forsaken (5:20), asking for a return and new days (5:21), and the last word unveiled a moving accusation to God (5:22). 10 God’s voice is yet to be heard, and the book ends. Lament with the Oppressed When Lamentations is absent in our liturgy and theology we lose the possibility to express our deep suffering and pain. It seems that theology prefers to give answers instead of expressing the senselessness of suffering. Looking at Lamentations from this perspective, we may find a way to walk with those suffering the consequences of the empire. We are not the voice of the voiceless, but we may commit ourselves to hear and allow their voices to be heard. We may stop giving answers that silence the suffering and the pain. We may take the suffering and pain, the hope and doubts, and offer those to God as a lament. PARODY Isaiah 14:4b–21 is a satirical parody of a dirge. It takes a particular literary genre, in our case, an elegy or dirge, and builds upon it. Parody uses a recognizable genre that subverts its content but respects, as much as possible, the literary genre, motives, and vocabulary of the text from which it borrows. It is so because it needs a hearer or reader to relate what is heard or read with another known text. The intertextual connection drawn by the hearer or reader is vital to parody. Gale Yee comments: The distinguishing feature of parody is its imitation of a particular literary work, form, or style, although the degree, subject matter, and purpose of this imitation vary according to authorial intent. This imitative character differen-

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tiates parody from satire, which does not need to be restricted to the imitation, distortion, or quotation of other literary works. 11

The literary characteristic of parody could be the reason why the text is introduced as māshāl (in v. 4). 12 As Shipp suggests, it is “an indication that a formal comparison is about to be made.” 13 From a different perspective, Hassler associates māshāl with a taunt-song, taking into consideration Habakkuk 2:6: A taunt song comprises a special literary genre that expresses public humiliation and execration over the ill-fortune of an individual or group. . . . Taunt songs incorporate a reversal of fortune: the strong king becomes weak (Isa 14) and the spoiler gets spoiled (Hab 2). 14

It is nonetheless important to distinguish, as Gale Yee does, the difference between a taunt song and a parody. It is vital in our case to keep in mind that Isaiah 14 is a parody of other texts, which may not be self-evident. 15 Shipp distinguishes two types of dirges in the Old Testament and the ancient Near East: “One characterized by memory of the deceased and intend to eulogize him or her; and another, a liturgical dirge intended to ensure the safe and proper descent of the deceased king to the underworld and legitimate the new king on his throne.” 16 He goes further and proposes that “Isaiah 14:4b–21 resembles to some degree the common dirge in terms of structure, but also resembles the royal dirge in terms of thematic content and even the ordering of those themes.” 17 He compares KTU 1.161, 18 a Sumerian text about the Death or Ur-Nammu, 19 with Isa 14:4b–21 and Eze 32:18–21 and identifies six moments: command to go down, lament, rousing underworld dwellers, Rephaim/dead kings, sacrifice for/by kings, new king proclaimed. 20 These moments are present in our text but in the form of a satirical parody about the desired death of the oppressor. Liberation of the Oppressed The parody of Isaiah 14:4b–21 with its poetic metric of qînāh (3 + 2) is framed with a prose (vv. 3–4a and vv. 22–23) that contains a direct speech of Yhwh. This is preceded with an oracle against Babylon in 13:2–22. In this way the announcement of salvation to God’s people is the center, around which is judgment and destruction of Babylon (Isa 13) and its king (Isa 14). The salvation of the oppressed is the reason and justification of Yhwh’s actions, as it is shown by the opposition of Jacob/Israel (vv. 1–3a) with the destruction of Babylon (vv. 22–23). The salvation announced in vv. 1–2 has a deep sense of reversal but at the same time gives continuity to acts of oppression. Those that are oppressed

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will be exalted and will be served by others. This vocabulary and theology are problematic. The prescript (v. 3) introduces the reader to a new moment, critically different from endless oppression: “And it will be in the day when the Lord gives you rest from your pain and turmoil and harsh service in which you have been enslaved, that you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon” (vv. 3–4a). This one and half verse, which serves as an introduction, are words of the prophets to oppressed people (Jacob/Israel in v. 1). The present situation, faced by the intended reader, is described as hardship, fear, and bondage. The language is strong and picks up the oppression of the people under the Egyptian Empire (see Exod 1:14; 6:9; Deut 26:6) and under the oppression of their own government (1 King 12:4). It is a different oppressor, but the result is the same. The present situation will be over and the prophet invites the people to be ready for the day to come. The day has not arrived, but the vision of that day brings hope and comfort. A future of rest is on the horizon (vv. 1, 3). Oppression is not endless. After the instruction to sing a parody (v. 21) the prophet quotes an oracle from Yhwh. This oracle functions as confirmation of the parody. The people will take up (ns’) this māshāl (v. 4a) because Yhwh will rise (qûm) (v. 22). If the king cuts (krt) the trees of the “cedar forest” (v. 8), Yhwh will cut (krt) Babylon out (v. 22). The framework of the parody links the present oppression of the people (Jacob/Israel) to the Babylonian Empire and its king. In order to free the people and give them and the earth rest (nûah, vv. 3, 7) it is necessary to put an end to the empire and the king who supports it with his arrogant divine pretension. A Parody in Hope The parody follows the pattern of “royal dirge.” There are several proposals about how the text may be structured, and each has positive and negative aspects. 21 I focus, on the other hand, on the underlying voices in the text, the geographical dimensions and who is addressed. I therefore highlight the following moments of the text: Verses 3–4a: The prophet instructs the oppressed people that they will have to speak at that moment when the king of Babylon will be dead, and they will be liberated. Verses 4b–6: The people lament the death of the king and speak of what the tyrant (addressed in the third person) has done. Verses 7–8: The people describe the new situation after the death of the oppressor (addressed in the second person in v. 7–8a) and allow the cypresses and cedars to speak for themselves (8b).

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Verses 9–11: There is a geographical shift at this point, from earth to šeol. After a description of the implication of the king’s arrival, the already dead are to speak (vv. 10–11). The discourse is in second person and is addressed directly to the dead king. Verses 12–15: The people ironically lament (‘êk) the fall of the king. Their voices (vv. 12, 15) frame the king’s pretension of divinity in vv. 13–14. The geographical reality of earth first (v. 12) and šeol later (v. 15) contrast with the king’s heavenly pretension articulated in the first-person speech. Verses 16–20: In šeol the people give voice to the shades (vv. 16–17). They are astonished at what they see. Then the oppressed give voice again to underline the difference between this king and his predecessors. Verse 21: Parody concludes with a discourse by the oppressed people, the same one that received the invitation from the prophet in v. 4. But this time it is a command to their peers to ensure that there will not be another king from his offspring. The Oppressor Is Dead (vv. 4b–6) In 4b, with the exclamation ‘êk (how), the reader/listener is introduced to a dirge. As such, the reader/listener expects to hear an exaltation of the king’s deeds and glory. However, the king has been described from the beginning as “oppressor.” Hence a sequence of negative words describes the king and his deeds: In v. 6 there is a clear description of how the tyrant used his power to strike down, blow, and persecute. Even more so, two negative particles biltî (unceasing) and bĕlî (unrelenting) show that the oppression is exercised without limit, without restrain. However, this despot and his power have ceased. Yhwh puts a limit to the king and his empire. As with former empires, Yhwh breaks down their power (v. 5). The Earth Rejoices in Its Rest (vv. 7–8) The reader/listener is not invited to cry over the death of the king, but to celebrate and laugh at this death. The king cannot be praised, and his absence will not be missed. The earth suffered the consequences of his politics. The text turns the reader to the earth: The whole earth is at rest and quiet; They break forth into singing. The cypresses exult over you, The cedars of Lebanon, saying, “since you were laid low, no one comes to cut us down.”

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The conquered land was plundered as Isaiah 37:24–29 reminds us in a speech attributed in first person to Sennacherib of Assyria. With my many chariots I have gone up the heights of the mountains To the far recesses of Lebanon; I felled its tallest cedars, Its choicest cypresses; I came to its remotest height, Its densest forest. I dug wells And drank waters, I dried up with the sole of my foot All the streams of Egypt. (vv. 24–26) 22

Supported by myths about a divine cedar forest Shipp suggests that “the image of the ‘cutter’ coming against the divine forest is analogous to Gilgamesh’s foray into the Cedar Forest and usurpation of divine privileges.” 23 The destruction of the cedar forest to build palaces and temples causes pain to the earth and is an expression of human hubris. The announced rest (nwh) for people (vv. 1, 3) is now a reality for earth too, and quietness (šqt) now has its place. The tyrant that abused nature usurping the place of God has met his destiny, a common one to all humankind. The Oppressor Has Become Weak (vv. 9–11) The reader is invited to see into šeol. According to the dirge, at the arrival of dead kings to the underworld, other royal dignitaries welcome them. In this way, the dignity of dead kings remains even in šeol. However, a different situation is presented. The quietness on earth contrasts with the agitation (rgz) that his presence brings to šeol (v. 9). The šeol raises the shades (rĕpha’îm) of the mighty ones (named male-goats, ‘atûdîm), and the kings from their thrones. All the portentous ceremony is merely to realize that the terrible king of Babylon is a human being, not a God; he was not the son of the stars, but just a dead one: You too become as weak as we! You have become like us! Your pomp is brought down to šeol And the sound of your harps; Maggots are the bed beneath you, And worms are your covering. (vv. 10–11)

The king of Babylon is a figure for the oppressive dead kings that are already in šeol. They all had pretended to be God.

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The Pretender Has Fallen (vv. 12–15) These verses are key for understanding the ideological arrogance and the vain deification of the oppressor that is so common among imperial discourses. These verses may be divided into three moments. First, in v. 12 the narrator places the reader in the context of a dirge, using the technical expression, ‘êk (how, as in v. 1). The text sets the reader in the context of a dirge to mock the vain aspiration of divinity. In the designation of the king as Hêlēl ben-shāhar “we have here an allusion to kings’ deification, a concept well appreciated in Mesopotamian royal ideology.” 24 To do so, Isaiah used “the traditional dirge imagery relating to dead kings.” 25 How, you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, You who laid the nations low! (v. 12)

Second, in vv. 13–14 the words of the king in first person are quoted. You said in your heart: “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne Above the stars of God I will sit on the mount of assembly On the heights of Zaphon; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds I will make myself like the Most High.

The quotation of the king’s words in first person gives the speech a particularly powerful sense, especially when the reader already knows its emptiness. Deification and divine attributes were extensively used in the ideological legitimization of royalty in the ancient Near East. We find in the prophet some strong critics to this ideology. For example, Ezekiel 28:2, also quoted in first person: I am a god; I sit in the seat of the gods, in the heart of the seas.

Also in Isaiah 31:3 is a clear confrontation with this ideology: “The Egyptian are human and not God; their horses are flesh and not spirit.” Genesis 3 also has a sharp critique to the human pretension of eternity. Third, in v. 15 the narrator contrasts, once again, the pretension of the king with reality. Even though it uses different vocabulary from v. 12, the idea of falling down creates a correspondence with vv. 13–14. Additionally,

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the verb yarad (brought down) in hophal shows that someone else causes the oppressor to fall (also in v. 11). This minor detail shows the reader the presence of someone else more powerful than the tyrant (see vv. 22–23). O’Connell goes further as he relates this text with the destruction of Babel in Gen 9 and the myth of Gilgamesh. He understands that “Isa. xiv 4b–21 is thus a subtle reversal of royal-mythic themes well-rehearsed in Mesopotamian culture. It is designed to evoke recognition that it is YHWH who vanquishes the pride of the Mesopotamian king(s).” 26 Cast Out from the Grave (vv. 16–20) In v. 16a the voice of the oppressed introduces the shades that will speak by themselves. Vv. 16b–17 are supposed to welcome and congratulate the dead king and give him a position of privilege. However, they are astonished for what they see; they cannot give credit to what happened. They portray the king’s actions in a very negative way. They recognize his power but they also acknowledge the destruction he has caused: Is this the man who made the earth tremble who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert and overthrew its cities, Who would not let his prisoners go home?

Croatto emphasizes that in this speech “the international relations of oppression and spoliation, and the imperialism of terror in the political, economic and social realms are highlighted.” 27 What was described by the oppressed in vv. 4–8 is now a portrait by the shades, which in fact are the king’s predecessor. In this way, the reader has a double and consistent negative vision of the oppressor. The focus comes back to the oppressed. There is a contrast between this king and those already dead. In v. 9 the shades, the great ones and the kings of the nations recognized that the king was just like them (v. 10). Against his pretension, he was a mere mortal. Nevertheless, vv. 18–20 emphasize that he is unlike them. All of them (v. 18) received a proper funeral according to their royal status and somehow they kept it even in their tomb (lit. “in his own house”). The king is deprived of that. Instead of a burial he will die and be left in the realm he used to master: the battlefield. Therefore, the text again creates an opposition between the reality in v. 6 with the reality of v. 19, between the present reality of death caused by the tyrant and his own death. Finally, in v. 20 the oppressed explain the reasons. The earth (v. 7) rejects him because he destroyed it. His people do not care about him because he

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killed them. The royal dirge ends with the enthronement of a new king, which shatters the hope that the descendants will come to power. Not Again (v. 21) Then, a change in the addressed. The liberated now call for action, in imperative form addressed to the listener/reader: Prepare slaughter for his sons because of the guilt of their father Let them never raise to possess the earth or cover the face of the world with cities. (v. 21)

This invitation needs to be understood with the royal dirge. Instead of sacrifices for the life of the king and for the crowning of a new one, as it is expected, 28 the reader/listener is invited to be ready to sacrifice the possible future kings, “It manifest the terror for the new green shoot of imperialisms.” 29 Otherwise, the earth will be exhausted and the people oppressed again with the extraction of resources needed to support the cities. Laughing with the Oppressed The parody of Isaiah 14:4b–21 with its ironic and sarcastic sense of humor brings comfort in several ways. First, the text puts the reader in the oppressive presence of the king of Babylon. However, at the same time, proclaiming his death brings people to a future beyond the empire. This gives them hope. Second, it denounces the oppression done by the empire and how it affects all realms: earth, heaven and šeol. The entire world is corrupted by his arrogant and divine pretension. Third, it deconstructs the imaginary and discourse of the empire that support its actions of domination, oppression, destruction, and usurpation of divine privileges. Fourth, the genre of parody and the satiric use of the royal dirge allow the prophet to communicate hope in a context of hopelessness. Humor can move people’s understanding and perceptions to places where rational discourse cannot. MURGA 30 The Murgas have been for more than one hundred years a vital and popular expression of carnival, humor, and parody in Uruguay, especially in Montevideo. Its origin and influences are complex and controversial. It combines different African and European expressions and it developed in Uruguay in a very particular way:

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Rogelio Dario Barolin The category Murgas is conceptually a natural way of communication, it transmits the song of the neighborhood, it picks up the poetry of the street, and it sings the thoughts of the asphalt. An expressive form with streaks of rebelliousness and romanticism transcends popular language. The murga, essence of citizen’s feelings, is an authentic self-caricature of society. Through it the events of the society are identified and recognized, what people see, hear and say, taken with humor and in their unusual, joking aspect and without concessions and if the situation requires it, it will show the conceptual hardness of its criticism, which is its true essence. 31

A relevant characteristic of murga’s composition is that, following the tradition of medieval troubadours, they are structured as “contrafactum from popular songs.” 32 Murgas do not just use a known melody to give their own message but may also use the content, images, or even the context of the song to create a representation that will be picked up by the audience. Every murga develops its own history and proposal. Some underline the classic tradition of murga (the murga-murga) but others, without losing the technical and artistic aesthetic characteristics, emphasize the message—this group is called “murga-message.” This kind of murga had a rich and powerful presence in the resistance against dictatorship in Uruguay and continues today to engage social and political concerns. Anti-establishment thematic and political satire are two of the essential aspects of murga-message. They had a particular relevance during the dictatorship to express resistance and protest against military dictatorship. During this period, “the powerful censure leads to a frequent use of metaphor, hidden allusion, second readings.” 33 Rafael Bayce proposes that carnival traditionally offers a context of greater tolerance and a certain openness to alternative ways of thinking and expression. This enables “ideological resistance . . . through gesture and discourse.” 34 Murga was not an isolated island of resistance but was the public and massive expression of a wider movement among the minoritized, hidden and underground. CONCLUSION In this chapter I show the relevance of alternative expression to rational theological discourse as a way to cope with and to resist the empire and its oppression, and at the same time stay close to and engaged with people who are victims. Lamentations is an invitation to attentive listening of the suffering and pain of people, and the need to empower their voices to be heard. If Lamentations is an invitation to mourn, Isaiah 14 is an invitation to laugh. In a context of suffering and with strong sense of powerlessness, humor and parody invite us to resist the empire with humor and “malicious” laughter

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and also sow the certainty of a new future. The murga is a specific example of this. NOTES 1. John D. Witvliet discusses “the use of biblical laments in crisis situations.” He suggests to take seriously the literary form and context of the biblical laments and not just to pick up some quotable verses. See “A Time to Weep: Liturgical Lament in Times of Crisis,” http:// www.reformedworship.org/article/june-1997/time-weep-liturgical-lament-times-crisis (accessed on May 9, 2017). However, he is thinking more in the use of Psalms that are texts of supplication rather than lamentation itself. The Psalms are embedded with confidence but the lamentation is surrounded with despair and hopelessness. 2. See F. W. Dobbs-Allsoop, “Lamentations from Sundry Angles: A Retrospective,” in Lamentations in Ancient and Contemporary Cultural Contexts, edited by Nancy C. Lee and Carleen Mandolfo (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 15–17. 3. Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright (eds.), A New English Translation of the Septuagint (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 4. F. W. Dobbs-Allsoop, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (Roma: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1999), 97–155. 5. Mercedes García-Bachman, “Las múltiples voces de Lamentaciones: Hacerse profecía desde el dolor,” Revista Bíblica de Interpretación Latinoamericano 67 (2010): 91. 6. All biblical quotations are from NRSV. 7. Kathleen O’Connor, “Voices Arguing about Meaning,” in Lamentations in Ancient and Contemporary Cultural Contexts, edited by Nancy C. Lee and Carleen Mandolfo (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 28. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) and García-Bachman, “Las múltiples voces de Lamentaciones,” 67–80. 11. Gale A. Yee, “The Anatomy of Biblical Parody: The Dirge Form in 2 Samuel 1 and Isaiah 14,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 50 (1988): 566. 12. Nissim Amzallag and Avriel Mikhal, “The Cryptic Meaning of the Isaiah 14 Māšāl.” Journal of Biblical Literature 131.4 (2012): 643–62. 13. Mark Shipp, Of Dead Kings and Dirges. Myth and Meaning in Isaiah 14:4b–21 (Leiden, MA: Brill, 2002), 43. 14. Mark A. Hassler, “Isaiah 14 and Habakkuk 2: Two Taunt Songs against the Same Tyrant?” The Master’s Seminary Journal 26.2 (2015): 221–22. 15. Examples of parody of a dirge include 2 Sam 1:19–27: Lament (qînāh) of David for the death of Saul and Jonathan; 2 Sam 3:33–34: Lament (qînāh) of David for the death of Abner; Jer 22:18: Non-lament (sāphad) of the prophet for the expected death of Jehoiakim; Eze 32:18–32: a taunt of a lament (nāhāh) of the prophet for the Pharaoh of Egypt. 16. Shipp, Of Dead Kings and Dirges, 66. 17. Ibid. 18. This is a funerary ritual of the royal family in ancient Ugarit. In this ritual the sun goddess Sapsu played an important role as the psychopompe who was about to bring down the newly dead king Niqmaddu to the underworld where the divine ancestor (ilib) was enthroned. Niqmaddu was thus to descend to the underworld and appear before the throne of his “lord,” ilib, to join the ancestors of his family (David Toshio Tsumura, “The Interpretation of the Ugaritic Funerary Text KTU 1.161” in Official Cult and Popular Religion in the Ancient Near East, edited by Eiko Matsushima, 40–55 [Heidelberg, Universitat VerlagTsumura 1993], 55; see also Matthew J. Suriano, “Dynasty Building at Ugarit: The Ritual and Political Context of KTU 1.161,” Aula Orientalis 27 [2009]: 105–23).

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19. Samuel Kramer suggests that “it seems to be the work of a highly imaginative palace or temple poet who was deeply affected by the death of Ur-Nammul, one of Sumer’s great kings, who had died prematurely, leaving much of his work unfinished. What disturbed the poet most was the seeming in-justice and unfairness of the gods’s article” (Samuel Kramer, “The Death of Ur-Nammu and his Descent to the Netherworld,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 21 [1967]: 104). 20. Shipp, Of Dead Kings and Dirges, 65. 21. See, e.g., Robert O’Connell, “Isaiah XIV 4b–23: Ironic Reversal through Concentric Structure and Mythic Allusion,” Vetus Testamentum 38.4 (1998): 407–18; José Severino Croatto, “Una liturgia fúnebre por la caída del tirano,” Revista de Interpretación Bíblica Latinoamericana 2 (1988): 64; Luis Alonso Schökel and José Luis Sicre, Profetas I (Madrid: Cristiandad, 1980), 172–204. 22. Similar references are found also in the Assyrian record. Shipp mentions the campaign of Tiglath-Pileser I (1114–1076 BCE); Assurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE); Sennacherib (705–681 BCE) (Shipp, Of Dead Kings and Dirges, 142–43). I may add Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BCE) (see James Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], 307). 23. Shipp, Of Dead Kings and Dirges, 148; see also O’Connell 1988, 415. 24. Croatto, “Una liturgia fúnebre por la caída del tirano,” 62. 25. Shipp, Of Dead Kings and Dirges, 152. 26. O’Connell, “Isaiah XIV 4b–23,” 414. 27. Croatto, “Una liturgia fúnebre por la caída del tirano,” 63. 28. Shipp, Of Dead Kings and Dirges, 157–58. 29. Croatto, “Una liturgia fúnebre por la caída del tirano,” 64. 30. In this chapter I am especially grateful and indebted to Prof. Joel Gonnet Artus who gave me an introduction and bibliography to understand this artistic expression. 31. See http://www.enlacesuruguayos.com/Carnaval.htm (accessed 21 May 2017). 32. Marita Fornaro Bordolli, “Voice, Body, People: Polyphonic Singing in Hispanic-Uruguayan Music,” in Music and Shared Imaginaries: Nationalisms, Communities, and Choral Singing—Proceedings, edited by Maria do Rosário Pestana and Helena Marinho (Lisboa: ExLibris, 2014), 316. 33. Marita Fornaro Bordolli, “Los cantos inmigrantes se mezclaron . . . la murga uruguaya: encuentro de orígenes y lenguajes,” in Revista Intercultural de Música 6 (2002) (http:// www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/230/los-cantos-inmigrantes-se-mezclaron-la-murga-uru guaya-encuentro-de-origenes-y-lenguajes). 34. Rafael Bayce, “Y el pueblo vuelve a soñar. El microcosmos de las letras de la murga,” Brecha 330 (1992): 16.

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Chapter Eight

A Decolonial Reading of Ephesians For Resisting the Postcolonial Empire Jin Young Choi

“Empire is always evolving and taking on varying shapes in different periods,” writes Joerg Rieger. 1 Despite the liberation of colonized peoples, empires still exist; they have just changed the way they exercise power. Direct political and economic domination using military forces over colonies has been replaced with indirect but more complicated ways of domination through globalization. 2 It is in this context of globalization that Rieger discusses the cosmic Christ, attending to the role of the United States as a postcolonial empire. One of the most distinct characteristics of the postcolonial empire is that its exercise of power is less conspicuous than in the past and that it is not recognized or challenged as an empire. As a migrant from a formerly colonized country, I see how the power of the postcolonial empire operates on a global scale. Korea was colonized by the Japanese Empire from 1910 to 1945. After its liberation, the intervention of the two emerging world superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—divided Korea into North and South Koreas and caused the Korean War. And although South Korea became one of the fastest growing developed countries, military subordination to the United States is still in place and the economy is under the control of neoliberal global capitalism. While economic globalization based on free trade promised mutual benefits and common prosperity for both developing and developed countries, in fact it protected political and economic elites and reinforced disparities between the global North and South. 3 The United States has played a dominant role in shaping this imbalance in the global economy. What does the Bible have to do with the postcolonial empire? How may biblical interpretations engage and resist the master discourse of globaliza89

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tion that influences my personal and communal life? I chose Ephesians to read in this particular context for three reasons. First, Ephesians, full of the language of power and cosmic imagery, displays a distinctive perspective and position in negotiating the Roman Empire. Second, it is striking that, despite strong textual evidences of its engagement with imperial politics, only a few scholars have discussed the topic of Ephesians and empire. The dominant, seemingly objective interpretation and its omission of this topic have, of course, political implications. Last, the language of imperial power on the cosmic scale casts light on the current situation of postcolonial empire. After briefly examining the dominant interpretation of Ephesians, I will read the text from an imperial-critical perspective and suggest implications of this reading for the postcolonial imperial context. EPHESIANS SCHOLARSHIP AND EMPIRE Ephesians provides barely any historical information regarding its author and the Christian community that it addressed. It only implies that a majority of its recipients are Gentiles (2:11) and it describes a community-building project “upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets” (2:20). Ephesians depicts the unity of Jews and Gentiles as a present reality and indicates a realized harmony within the post-Pauline church. 4 Thus, many scholars read Ephesians as a “summary of Pauline teaching.” 5 Such a discussion highlights the characteristic of Ephesians as theologically abstract and focuses on issues within the early Christian community or regarding Jewish-Christian relations. Others reconstruct the situation of Christians in colonial cities, such as Ephesus, in which ethnic tensions were caused by either Gentile arrogance over Jewish Christians or Jewish ethnocentrism. 6 However, based on archaeological data that show Jews’ integration in the regions such as Phrygia, Harry O. Maier argues against the assumption of actual hostility and its resolution between Jews and Gentiles. 7 Ephesians’s rhetoric of peace may describe the imperial situation in which political concord, that is, “the empire wide end of hostility,” was pursued through the “pacification of enemies.” 8 In other words, Ephesians replicated the Flavian political propaganda of concord and peace. Maier’s view is helpful in that he does not limit Ephesians to an intrareligious document, but his interpretation implies that Christ’s reign replaces Roman imperial rule and the church is the alternative to the empire. Paul uses political language to persuade the audience to realize their new identity in a new rule of God in Christ. This is what Maier means by “imperial situation.” 9 A few other scholars explicitly argue that Ephesians’s use of the imperial language and images, attributed to Roman emperors, presents an anti-imperial resistance, 10 rather than an accommodationist attitude toward

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the empire. 11 However, the idea that “[s]uch a God-ordained body politic with its reigning Lord trumps, while subverting, Roman imperial” propaganda may be questionable for some people. 12 What does it mean that a minority group of people in the empire employed mimesis of imperial politics as a survival strategy, even while their own language of lordship and power suppressed the presence and voices of women, children, and slaves? What are the implications and impact of these faithful interpretations in contemporary postcolonial situations? I attempt to probe not only imperial politics inscribed in the text but also politics of the text, that is, its rhetorical power. Such a rhetorical analysis comprises a critique of both kinds of interpretations. First, the dominant interpretation does not acknowledge empire and imperial politics in the ancient text and in the present time. This theological and “neutral” interpretation is not apolitical. Second, the resistance readings of empire studies scholars, though a minority position, are limited in that they are reluctant to address imperialism and patriarchy as an inherent component, both in biblical texts and biblical interpretation. 13 Instead, I regard Ephesians as a social discourse produced in the Roman Empire, which embodies “ideological and counter-ideological elements and forces.” 14 The oppressed in the empire may take the counter-hegemonic stance, while also mimicking the hegemonic discourse and practice. Consequently, I turn to read Ephesians by focusing on the multilayered deployment of ideologies in the text and in its interpretations. EPHESIANS AND EMPIRE The Cosmic Christ as the Postapocalyptic Unlike Paul’s letters, Ephesians does not consider church to be the local congregation, which is the body of Christ (1 Cor 1:27). Instead, Ephesians refers to the universal church, whose head is Christ. 15 With great power, God raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand. Now Christ is in the “heavenly places” (epouranioi) “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come” (Eph 1:20–21). The temporal dualism that “this age and the age to come” display is one of the distinctive ideas in Jewish apocalyptic literature and Paul’s letters. Neil Elliott presents Paul’s apocalyptic understanding of the cross in political terms. Paul sees that the cross exposes violence by political powers, behind which spiritual forces exist, and that it is only “the beginning of the destruction of the evil powers.” 16 In the cross the powers that brought Christ there remain unconquered. 17 Yet, Ephesians displays a different understanding of Jesus’s death as having overthrown those powers. In Ephesians, Jesus died to break down the

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dividing wall that separated Jews from Gentiles (2:14–16). Jesus’s death is not for the justification of believers, but for the church, which is at a central place in God’s plan for the unity of all creation (5:25). God’s plan to unify all things is accomplished by the exaltation of Christ, which has already occurred. Ephesians depicts Christ’s lordship over the powers as the present reality. In this way the tension of “already-but-not-yet” maintained in Paul’s letters is absorbed in “spatial dualism.” 18 Spatial dualism applies to the believers in Christ because they are also located in the heavenly places with him. This is more explicitly illustrated in 2:5–6: “even when we were dead through our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (cf. Rom 6:5). Not only are the death and resurrection of Christ events in the past, but the resurrection of the believers also has already occurred. This transcendental replacement is the spiritual blessing that the believers receive (1:3). Adding to the observations that Elliott makes on the differences between Paul’s theology of the powers and that of the pseudo-Pauline letters, particularly in Colossians, I offer further observations on several of the differences between 1 Corinthians 15 and Ephesians 1. First, while both passages speak of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, it is clear in the Corinthians passage that the subjection of all things and enemies is conditional (“when,” “after,” “until”). The end has not come yet—unlike Ephesians. Second, even when all things are subjected in the future (1 Cor 15:27–28), Paul highlights that “the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all” (cf. Ps 8:7). As Christiaan Beker contends, Paul’s apocalyptic conviction is theocentric in that Christ is subordinate in the coming final glory of God. 19 In contrast, in Ephesians Christ is the one “who fills all in all.” Third, whereas Ephesians emphasizes the “heavenly” places where Christ is enthroned, Paul uses the term epouranios modifying “bodies” to explain the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor 15:35–56). The mortal/perishable body, which will put on immortality/the imperishable, reminds the reader of Jesus’s humiliated body in his death. 20 Along the same lines, Paul speaks in Philippians 3:21 of “the body of our humiliation (our humble bodies)” that will be “conformed to the body of his glory by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.” Again, in Ephesians, Jesus’s body, broken and humiliated by political power, turns into the blood of the disembodied Christ, which functions to reconcile two hostile groups to God in one body (1:7; 2:13, 16). Fourth, paradoxically, the power whose source is God manifested in the word of the cross: the crucified Christ is the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:18, 24; 2:1–5). God’s wisdom is hidden in mystery and “none of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have

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crucified the Lord of glory” (2:7–8). In Ephesians, however, the mystery of Christ is now revealed not only to the apostle but also to every human being, and even to “the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” through the church (3:3–5, 9–10). The mystery of the gospel is not the crucified Christ but is about the relationship between Christ and the church (5:32; 6:19). Last, while Paul sets the hierarchy using the term “head” in the order of God-Christ-man-woman, it is in the particular context of church worship in which he argues that no single part or member of the body—even the head— can claim its superiority over other members (1 Cor. 11:3–16; 12:12–29). Yet, this egalitarian view of church order is not present in Ephesians. The image of head-body in the relationship of Christ and the church is extended to that of husband and wife. Although a husband is required to love his wife as Christ sacrificed himself for the church, the language of headship and subjection applied to the wife renders symbolic power to the husband (5:23). 1:22 He has put (subjected, hypetaxen) all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church. 5:22–24 Wives, be subject (hypotassomenoi, v. 21) to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject (hypotassetai) to Christ, so also wives ought to be subject, in everything, to their husbands.

Paul’s apocalyptic understanding of the cross turns into the depiction of the cosmic Christ above all of those political and spiritual powers in Ephesians. While I agree with Elliott that Ephesians “accommodate(s) the word of the cross to the interests of empire,” I do not think that its theology is “inherently liable to an otherworldly spiritualization that distracts us from the web of this worldly power relations, or else baptizes those power relations as already obedient to Christ.” 21 Ephesians’s claim on the cosmic Christ and his omnipotence is unequivocally political. Furthermore, its rhetoric mimics Rome’s empire-building ideology, which resonates with some aspects of the postcolonial empire. Mimicking Empire: No Longer Sojourners but Imperial Citizens Judith Perkins argues that two cosmopolitan social identities emerged as the Roman Empire was solidified. The one is a transempire elite alliance joined together on the basis of cultural and educational privilege; and the other is the Christian church, another transempire social entity, constituted by common religious and moral beliefs and practices. 22 She contends that the emergence of the Christian church as a cultural movement disrupted the imperial

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ideology of Greek and Roman elites and their monopoly on social power and authority by establishing its own cosmopolitan identity. 23 In this regard, the Christian church was an alternative site of the imperial power. 24 Yet, what is different between Greek and Roman elites’ transimperial ideology and nonelite Christians’ universalizing discourse is the latter’s “sense of separateness or otherness.” 25 They felt even in their own home that they had no patria, no homeland in this world. 26 As in 1 Peter (1:1; 2:11), the term that expresses early Christians’ self-understanding is sojourners (paroikoi). The expression “sojourners” in early Christian writings represents Christians’ transimperial identity as one of being estranged in their own homeplace (see Heb 11:13). 27 First Clement, dated around 95–96 CE, starts with the words, “The Church of God sojourning in Rome to the church of God sojourning in Corinth.” However, Ephesians, which was written in the same approximate period as 1 Clement, insists that they are “no longer strangers [ksenoi] and sojourners [paroikoi]” but “fellow citizens [sympolitai] with the saints and members of the household [oikeioi] of God” (2:19). If ksenoi and paroikoi imply a way of cosmopolitan living, the identification of sympolitai and oikeioi associates them with the civic life of any local community members but universalizes their presence in a different way. Their new identity is found in the Hellenistic political notion of polis and oikos. In addition, “the household of God” displays a concrete building structure, being reminiscent of Familia Caesaris, the imperial household (2:19–21). These identity markers signify a new type of theopolitical entity. The Christian civic identity is universalized through the extension of the realm to the heavenly places, in which they found their citizenship, and the expansion of their social body. Empire-building Project through Concord and Peace Such a formation of the social body is possible by imitating the imperial body-building project. Eph 4:7–11 demonstrates that the grace was given to believers as the measure of Christ’s gift (dōrea). The author quotes Psalm 68:18, after which defeated enemies are captured and gifts are given to the conqueror. Yet, the author changes “you [God] received gifts [elabes domata]” in the Psalm passage to “he [Christ] gives gifts [edōken domata].” The expression “captured captives” or “made captivity captive” in the citation implies the total defeat of Christ’s enemies and reinforces the victory motif with military imagery, which is anticipated in 6:10–20. 28 The purpose of Christ’s gift-giving is “to set” or “to equip” the saints for two things (4:12): the work of ministry, and the building up of the body of Christ. The word “setting” (katartismos) is literally used to mean “the setting of a bone.” As the bone of a body is set, the ministers play a role to set

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believers for the work of ministry. In this way, the order of God’s gifts is in view: above all, the apostle’s ministry as diakonos according to the gift of God’s grace (3:7); then, God’s gifts of people in the preaching and teaching ministry (4:11); and then, those ministers effect the believers’ work of ministry (v.12). Christ’s giving of grace fortifies the unity and order of the communal body by utilizing the battle imagery and establishing hierarchy rather than promoting diversity as in Paul’s letters. 29 Another purpose of the gifts of Christ to the church is to build up the whole body. Here, the use of body metaphor is more explicit. The building (oikodomē) of the body implies that the body is constructed like temple building (cf. 4:12, 29). The whole structure [oikodomē] is joined together [synarmologoumenē] and grows into a holy temple in the Lord in whom you also are built [synoikodomeisthe] into for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. (2:21) [Christ] from whom the whole body join [synarmologoumenon] and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds [oikodomēn] itself in love. (4:16)

What is repeated in these passages is the building of the body that is joined together (with emphasis on syn [together] in the text) and grows. It is plausible that the building imagery reminds the audience of imperial civic projects. Temples, shrines, and monuments built in major cities of the Roman Empire functioned to exhibit imperial expansive power and thereby created the sense of unity. More often, when rivalry and competition through those constructions were intense in the pursuit of civic and individual imperial honor or favor, the Roman Empire needed to solidify the ideology of concord or homonoia. 30 The civic harmony that the empire pursued presupposes the conquest of enemies and suppression of the colonized. When the audience heard that “he [Christ] came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near” (2:17), they might have been reminded of “an imperial peace that stretched across the whole world” through military conquest. 31 Ephesians not only depicts the unity and peace that Christ brought on social and global scales but also internalizes the imperial ethos and order at the expense of others in and outside of the community. First, while Ephesians highlights the resolution of the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles, it “otherizes” both Gentiles and Jews who are outside the church. The ideology of unity redraws the boundary of the newly constituted body. Gentiles who were formerly alienated from Jewish privilege (politeia) are now alienated from “the life of God” if they are not related to Christ (2:1–2, 12; 4:17). The life the Gentiles live comes from disability and darkness of their mind and knowledge (4:18) and thus they belong to the cosmic evil power. Gentiles as

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a collective become enemy. Jews are also described as total other in that their Jewishness no longer guarantees entry into the polis and the oikia of God, as is proved by the abolishment of Law (2:15). The unity in Ephesians is the absorption of a people (Israel) into the new people of God through the suspension of the former identity. Additionally, Ephesians reinscribes the oppression of minorities in the community such as women and children. The theopolitical notion of the household of God reinforces the inside code of the household. The claim that “we may no longer be children” fortifies the imperial ideal of manliness (andra teleion) that the corporate body must attain (4:13–14). Although the growth of all parts of the body into Christ is founded on the love of Christ, which applies to a husband’s headship of his wife, the wife is subjected to her husband (5:25, 28, 33). We have observed that by the language of headship and subjection, symbolic power is transferred from Christ’s cosmic domination over all to the husband, linking the larger household of God with the household code. It is problematic to argue that the language of subjection imposed to women is not oppressive but countercultural because the husband will treat the wife based on Christ’s example of love for the church. In Ephesians, the death of Christ is reinterpreted as for the church, and the emphasis shifts from the body of Christ to the body of the church-wife: “he gave himself up for her in order to make” her body holy and pure without any spot, wrinkle, or blemish. 32 In its imitation of imperial logic and order, Ephesians bolsters the wall against outsiders and reinforces internal divisions and oppression. To summarize, Ephesians is not merely an abstract interpretation of Pauline tradition but seeks to extend the dominating imperial ideology of unity and peace, building an alternative social body. The claim of the cosmic Christ could be seen as an act of resistance, but Ephesians internalizes the imperial logic of unity using the language of power. Its construction of the communal body accommodates to the civil construction, and imperial bodybuilding is expanded to the universe. Ephesians shows not only the formation of a Christian identity at domestic, political, and universal levels but also the shift from counter-hegemonic to hegemonic claims in relation to the imperial politics. REREADING EPHESIANS AND POSTCOLONIAL EMPIRE Postcolonial Critique of Powers Rereading Ephesians in the postcolonial imperial context leads us to focus on the language of power. All are caught in a web of power relations, and religions are not free from this reality. Foucault maintains, “something called

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Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action.” 33 When power in Ephesians is written, read, interpreted, and used, it comes to life. The language of power embedded in the cosmic Christ and the universal church may buttress “the structures of domination that it seeks to overcome.” 34 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza explains how the language of power is extended from the text to biblical interpretation: Hence, biblical scholars have to explore not only how the power of empire has historically shaped and affected Christian Scripture but also how it continues to shape cultural and religious self-understandings today. . . . If people do not become aware of the language of empire at work today, they internalize the ethos of empire: violence exclusion and submission to G*d, the almighty King and Christ the Lord, in and through the process of reading Scripture. 35

The language of power is not just in the text, but it is performative and influences Christian identity and praxis. Any interpretation of Ephesians that does not responsibly address and reflect on such rhetorical power in the text and in the interpretation either hides or promotes asymmetric power relations and injustice. How would we read Ephesians’ dominant themes of unity, reconciliation, and peace in the uneven power relations of the global political and economic order, as well as of patriarchy? When the text describes the church as an alternative to the empire that surpasses all earthly and heavenly powers, or when the church asserts Christian triumphalism based on such a reading, how might the church engage empires? Postcolonial Empire The problem is that ways of exercising power have changed in the postcolonial empire. Rieger contends that the postcolonial empire utilizes “more subtly powerful and far-reaching forms of exercising power” while abstaining from direct political control. 36 The political powers of the nation-state still operate, but one nation does not constitute this postcolonial empire. Even when the United States plays the key role in economic globalization, it serves “no longer for the benefit of the nation but for an emerging global power structure.” 37 In his book American Empire, Andrew J. Bacevich uses Bill Clinton’s perception of “the end of the Cold War as signifying ‘the fullness of time,’” which alludes to Ephesians 1:10. Pointing to America’s transcendent status and mission, Bacevich states that “God’s promise of peace on earth remained unfulfilled; it was now incumbent upon the United States, having ascended to the status of sole superpower, to complete God’s work.” 38 The “sole superpower” has employed indirect control in maintaining the global order. In this

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postcolonial empire Rieger calls attention to the theology of the cosmic Christ. The cosmic Christ can be viewed as resisting empire based on the mutuality and interdependency that Christ promotes as in Ephesians. 39 However, while Ephesians emphasizes the work of the cosmic Christ as bringing “together parts which have been scattered and separated,” I find Rieger’s warning insightful: “[c]alls for connection and relationship that do not take into account the asymmetries of power might end up reinforcing distorted connections.” 40 The problem is not disconnection or fragmentation but the exploitation that the marginalized suffer from the global system of connection. As far as subjection is encouraged by imperial and patriarchal orders, the language of reconciliation, interconnectedness, or love can legitimize and reinforce oppression. Reading Ephesians, we should ask how the cosmic Christ might provide a challenge to the dominant powers of capitalist globalism. Only when we raise the issue of power differentials in the postcolonial empire can we engage and support the increasing interdependence of people in the globalized world. American Empire However, this postcolonial imperial situation has been further complicated by recent political events such as Brexit (the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union) and Donald Trump’s election as the forty-fifth president of the United States. How could one explain Trump’s explicit political control, which is based solely on the nation’s economic interests and is accompanied by his attempt to intervene even in the global order? His empire-building project is based on exclusion, not bringing together all members of national and international societies. His policy is to cut off all connections, slam all doors, and fortify boundaries with anti-trade and anti-immigration regulations. The American Empire is getting bolder in executing imperial hegemony. Rather than employing “low intensity conflict” strategies, Trump wants to wield hard power, with the scattershot of mercantilist nationalism, exceptionalism, racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, violence, bullying, and bellicosity. Although his protection of borders seems to oppose a globalist vision, he is no less ambitious in building an ever-stronger world empire. Trump’s “great America” is supreme over all other countries and any agencies of global governance. This empire seeks unity and security by suppressing women, refugees, religious others, and sexual minorities. The concession that “we were all immigrants (sojourners)” must be ignored. While Rieger suggests that “[d]espite the more open displays of power now being seen, in the long run the less visible tactics of the postcolonial empire are the more significant

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ones” in the current political reality. We must struggle against the conspicuous universal power of the American Empire. 41 Conservative Christianity and White Evangelicals Conservative Christians’ support of Trump’s American Empire is never innocent. It is known that over 80 percent of Evangelicals, who are mostly white, voted for Trump. Before and after his election, Evangelical Christians urged and celebrated unity. When Trump’s election was announced, Ronnie Floyd, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a member of Trump’s Evangelical advisory board, issued a written statement: “I pray sincerely that God might grant wisdom to our new commander in chief to lead our nation in righteousness and toward peace and justice. This is a time to rebuild and to reconcile, to lock arms with our fellow Americans and work with our elected officials for a better future.” 42 While one can sense the echo of Ephesians’ imperial language in Floyd’s comments, presidential candidate Ted Cruz boldly said, “I believe in Ephesians. We need to put on our whole body armor.” 43 More than once Floyd used the imagery of spiritual warfare in Ephesians to gain Evangelical supporters. Thus the imperial language and militant images of Ephesians are used in public discourse—in the context of the American Empire. And, significant numbers of North American church members serve this empire, which is based on the imperial ideology of the cosmic Christ. CONCLUSION While Maier’s historical-critical approach to Ephesians and empire does not allow him to problematize the contemporary empires, he alludes to the effect of the “superimperial” vision of the reign of Christ in Ephesians. This superimperialism was extended to the later attempt to forge an “allegiance of church and state in a new imperial and civil order.” 44 He describes the further effect of this collusion of the Constantine empire and the church: “The outcome of that development is a set of social and political ideals that frame— usually unconsciously—modern Western identity, even in their most secular manifestations.” 45 In light of those few examples of how Ephesians and its superimperialist ideology have been used in the hegemonic discourse of US politics, biblical critics must examine empire and (post)colonialism to expose ideological aspects of the text and interpretations. In the face of neoliberal global capitalism and aggressive economic nationalism going hand in hand, what can biblical criticism provide? Before celebrating unity and interconnectedness and advocating peace, postcolonial biblical critics are required to analyze the web of power relations in which

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religious institutions and discourses are also involved. Furthermore, rereading the Bible in the postcolonial imperial context, the critics will have to articulate an alternative vision. Human beings imagine God through language and within our experiences. If imperial-colonial experiences shape our perception of God as an imperialist God, how could we create an alternative space in which we experience the just and merciful God anew? In the struggles against empires, it is time to rearticulate the cosmic Christ as the One who is for all people and for creation as interconnected and interdependent. Rereading Ephesians challenges us to keep seeking other ways of imagining God, Christ, the world, and the future of humanity and creation. NOTES 1. Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 272. 2. Rieger, Christ and Empire, 273. In the simplest terms, globalization is defined as “the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space” (Manfred Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction [Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013], 15). 3. Fernando F. Segovia, “Criticism in Critical Times: Reflections on Vision and Task,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134.1 (2015): 6–29; Steger, Globalization, 54. 4. Luke T. Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 411. 5. Margaret Y. MacDonald, Colossians and Ephesians (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 16; Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament, 412. 6. Harry O. Maier, Picturing Paul in Empire: Imperial Image, Text and Persuasion in Colossians, Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles ( New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 122–24. 7. Maier, Picturing Paul in Empire, 124. 8. Ibid. 9. Harry O. Maier, “Colossians, Ephesians, and Empire” in An Introduction to Empire in the New Testament, edited by Adam Winn (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 192. 10. Nijay K. Gupta and Fredrick J. Long, “The Politics of Ephesians and the Empire: Accommodation or Resistance?” Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 7 (2010): 112–36. 11. See Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1994) and Jennifer G. Bird, “The Letter to the Ephesians,” in A Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings, edited by Fernando F. Segovia and R. S. Sugirtharajah, 265–80 (London: T & T Clark, 2009). 12. Gupta and Long, “The Politics of Ephesians and The Empire,” 115. 13. R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed. Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006), 68. 14. Vincent B. Leitch, Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 44–45, 53. 15. MacDonald, Colossians and Ephesians, 15–16. 16. Elliott, Liberating Paul, 111–13. 17. Ibid., 114–25. 18. Elizabeth Johnson, “The Wisdom of God as Apocalyptic Power,” in Faith and History: Essays in Honor of Paul W. Meyer, edited by John T. Carroll, Charles H. Cosgrove, and E. Elizabeth Johnson, 137–48 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1990), 137–48, cited in Elliott, Liberating Paul, 111. 19. Christiaan Beker, The Triumph of God: the Essence of Paul’s Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

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20. Similarly, referring to Philippians 2:6–8, Elliott argues that, for Paul, Jesus did not only take on mortality but was “humbled as to accept the most humiliating of deaths, the form of execution reserved for slaves under Roman rule, crucifixion” (Elliott 1994, 110). 21. Elliott, Liberating Paul, 118, 121; see Bird, “The Letter to the Ephesians,” 272. 22. Judith Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 2. 23. Ibid., 13, 27–29. 24. Ibid., 9; see Denise Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 226. 25. Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities, 30; Judith Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 232. 26. Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities, 30, 32. 27. Lieu, Christian Identity, 232, 233. 28. MacDonald, Colossians and Ephesians, 290. 29. Regarding the gift, more differences are found between Paul’s letters and Ephesians. While Paul uses the term charisma, the gift which originates from the Spirit (1 Cor 12:4; Rom 12:6), the term gift (dōrea or doma) in Ephesians is a “more general reference to the exalted Christ’s giving of grace (cf. Acts 2:38; 10:45).” Also, in Ephesians 4 the diversity of gifts is subordinate to the major theme of unity. First Corinthians 12 and Romans 12 describe the gifts from the Spirit as the source of diversity (Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians [Dallas: Word Books, 1990], 230, 241; Pheme Perkins, Ephesians [Nashville: Abingdon, 1977], 102). 30. Maier, Picturing Paul in Empire, 107–8. 31. Maier, Picturing Paul in Empire, 126, 133. 32. As the term blemish (am ōmos) means the “absence of defects in sacrificial animals,” it is the church-wife to which the image of sacrifice transfers from Christ. Moreover, the husband’s sacrificial love would impose the ideal of “morally blameless,” another meaning of the term, on the wife, in addition to the subjection requirement in the household code. 33. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982): 788. 34. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Changing Horizons: Explorations in Feminist Interpretation ( Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 157. 35. Schüssler Fiorenza, Changing Horizons, 155. 36. Rieger, Christ and Empire, 275–78. 37. Ibid., 272, 276. 38. Schüssler Fiorenza, Changing Horizons, 159, cited in Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of American Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1. 39. Rieger, Christ and Empire, 269. 40. Ibid., 283. 41. Ibid., 273. 42. Emily McFarlan Miller, “ Evangelical Christians Celebrate and Urge Unity; Others Wary,” Religion News, http://religionnews.com/2016/11/09/religious-reactions-to-trump-wintime-to-rebuild-and-to-reconcile/ (accessed March 2, 2017). 43. Laura Premack, “Trump and Cruz Battle for Evangelical Hearts: Spiritual Warfare on the Campaign Trail,” Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/us/laura-premack-donald-trumpted-cruz-evangelical-christians (accessed March 2, 2017). 44. Maier, “Colossians, Ephesians, and Empire,” 201. 45. Ibid.

Chapter Nine

Using the Bible to Resist Empire in the Caribbean’s Jamaica Stephen C. A. Jennings

The territories that make up the Caribbean as a geographical entity have existed for millennia and have been populated for almost as long. They started their “modern” history when they became part of the itinerary of Christopher Columbus’s journeys to the New World in 1492. That mercantilist adventure, which led to the genocide of the Taino (Arawak), Ciboneys and Kalinago (Carib), all “Amerindian” peoples, eventually led to the arrival of enslaved Africans to provide the labor for first, the feudal, then, the capitalist projects that were plantation society. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade brought an estimated ten million Africans over a three-hundred-year period, with about the same number perishing along the way. Of that number, Jamaica received nearly a million in the same period, importing 469,893 slaves between 1703 and 1775 alone. 1 Of further significance is the fact that Christianity came along with this slavery project, for the most part providing its justification. Such an influence came literarily through various Iberian Catholic catechetical materials in the Spanish period. This was increasingly replaced by the English Common Book of Prayer and the King James (1611, Authorized) Version of the Bible in the period after the British (Protestant) takeover of much of the Caribbean, starting with St. Kitts in 1624, and the literature of the French Huguenots (who settled in St Kitts the year after). Although the King James Version was primarily used to teach the enslaved Africans both English and subordination—both were necessary to maintain the status quo in plantation society—some of these socially and theologically subordinated ones quickly grasped not only its psycho-spiritual benefits but its sociopolitical implications for oppression and liberation as well. It is to that story of hegemonic 103

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and counter-hegemonic readings of Scripture that is detailed below, paying particular attention to the Jamaican context. 2 HEGEMONIC READINGS IN JAMAICA: ERAS OF THE SPANISH AND BRITISH EMPIRES Scripture was used in Jamaica in the context of the Spanish Empire (1494–1655) and the British Empire (1655–1962) to justify a number of issues including colonialism, slavery, racism, classism, and genderism. Such hegemonic readings were also used elsewhere, and thus can be taken as illustrative of a larger and wider dominant and domineering Euro-Western hermeneutical project and process. Colonialism Colonialism—the taking over by one group of people (nation) of another people’s (nation’s) territories and its usufruct—was rife between the fifteen to twentieth centuries CE. It was mostly conducted by European nations, who invaded the lands and seas of peoples across the world. This was in an effort to gain access to the latter’s resources, with the aim to increase the former’s wealth, status, and power. Many of these European countries consequently became empires because of their invasive and imperial enterprises. One of the biggest colonializing and imperialist nations was Britain, or as they called themselves, Great Britain. As the empire that “ruled the seven seas,” and over which “the sun would never set,” the British Empire felt that they were chosen by God to colonize, commercialize, and Christianize the peoples of the world. They therefore had to find Scriptural warrant for their colonial (mis)advantages, a search that was easily fulfilled. These Britishers found ready justification in the stories of Israel going in and taking over the lands of the Canaanites, as recorded in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua. 3 In the context of the Caribbean, as elsewhere, the “natives” were regarded as “heathen” and “pagan,” as the ancient Israelites were to have seen the Hittites (Josh 1:4). This theological categorization made it easier for the British, and the Spanish, French, and Dutch before them, to “drive them out of the land” (see Josh 24: 1–28 esp. v. 8, 11–12), for these ungodly deserved to be displaced by the godly Europeans to whom God promised these lands. Jamaica, for instance, was seen as the “Promised Land” which was to become under European oversight a new “Garden of Eden.” 4

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Racism To make the land(s) truly fruitful, there was the need not only for oversight but for those who would provide the actual muscle to make it happen, given the then limited technology. Those persons were the enslaved Africans, who were brought to the “New World” precisely for this task. But why Africans? Sociologically, there were several factors. For instance, North Africans such as Moroccans (or “Moors” as they were called at the time) had provided the labor to develop European owned and run plantations, which were to be found in the Canaries, Azores, and the Madeira islands, territories off the coasts of both Europe and Africa. These North Africans were nearest in geographical terms to the Southern Europeans, such as the Spanish and Portuguese, who were the initial developers of the plantation project, and could therefore be found and conscripted for similar projects, if needs be. So when the New World was discovered and needed workers, Africans were the most likely to be called, and easiest to find. Furthermore, there was a long history of racial servitude in Europe, with black Africans filling that role for centuries, courtesy of the Arab Islamic organized trade in humans through overland and sea routes. Theologically, however, the primary justification came from one main text: Genesis 9:18–29. There, in the immediate post-diluvium, a drunken Noah curses one of his grandsons, Canaan. This was in response to what Ham, Canaan’s father, did, namely: telling his brothers Japheth and Shem that their father was naked and, together with them, covering him up while he was sleeping. Why Canaan was singled out for cursing, while his uncles for blessing is not immediately obvious. Scholars have long thought it was perhaps a justification for why the land of the Canaanites was to be colonized and its people “driven out.” What is clearer is that there was a long association of this curse with justifying racism against black Africans, starting with early Jewish, Christian, and Muslim hermeneutists. This is because Ham was considered the progenitor of black peoples, according to a particular interpretation of the so-called Table of Nations in Genesis 10. This “Hamitic curse” 5 was therefore used to explain why black people were inferior beings, and could therefore be treated as less than human, and less than humane. For they were singled out in a world of blessing—as the after-flood world was supposed to be—for divine curse. After all, since Noah was the patriarch through whom God warned the world, he could not be wrong even if he spoke in a drunken stupor. Black people, then, were cursed by God Himself, and therefore should be singled out to be cursed as inferior by—and to—godly white S[h]emtic (European) nations such as Spain and Britain.

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Slavery The “Hamitic curse” was also used to justify another great evil of the day, chattel slavery. The curse explicitly said that Canaan was cursed, and as a consequence to be “the servant” of Japheth and Shem. Since “servants” were conflated with “slaves” in the thinking of the time, this meant that Africans were meant—nay divinely ordained—to serve/be slaves of Europeans and their white offspring. These notions of a Euro-Western master class, and an African underclass, were further reinforced by Pauline (and presumably Pauline) texts, which admonished “slaves/servants [to] obey your [their] masters” (cf. Eph 6:5ff.; Col 4:22ff.; 1 Tim 6:1). Thus, those who advocated slavery and slave-holding could say that the Bible was on their side, and that the Old Testament was in agreement with the New Testament. Buying, having, and using slaves was approved by God himself, since not only God’s prophet Noah, but Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, said so. Presumably so did Jesus. Classism With perceptions and interpretations such as these, it is no wonder that even after slavery was abolished in the New World (in 1838 in the British Empire; 1865 in the United States; and 1888 in the Spanish Empire), the notion of a Euro-Western master class, and an Africana underclass continued. As chattel slavery morphed into a more general race-based, classist society, the same texts used to justify slavery (Gen 9: 18–29; Eph 6:5ff.; Col 4:22ff.; and 1 Tim 6:1, among others) were pressed into service (pun intended). Such interpretations were not just used to justify intrasocietal but intersocietal classism as well. So Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and their societal offspring such as United States, Australia, and South Africa, could rest secure in the knowledge that their quest for empire was biblically justified and divinely approved. 6 Genderism Scripture was also used to justify genderism and, specifically, the domination of males over females. This usage was not unique to the Caribbean but was present wherever patriarchy—which predated the making of the Bible itself—was found. (Indeed, the case could be made that the Bible itself contained many instances of patriarchal attitudes, language, and behaviors, and was generally supportive of patriarchy as an institution.) This was particularly true of the versions used by the empires that dominated the Caribbean, notably the Vulgate of the French Catholics and the King James of the British. Thus, from 1492, Caribbean peoples were schooled to regard men as superior to women, and in the context of racism, slavery, and classism, white

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and free men were deemed superior to black and enslaved women. Even when slavery was abolished, black women were considered inferior to white men. Texts attributed to the Apostle Paul such as Eph 5:22–34 and Col 3:18–19 were routinely cited to justify this position. 7 COUNTER-HEGEMONIC READINGS IN JAMAICA: ERA OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE (1655–1962) Scripture was also used in Jamaica to resist colonialism, slavery, racism, classism, and genderism. Resisting Colonialism Colonialism was religiously resisted in the Caribbean and the Americas as soon as the Europeans gained control in the region. In the late 1490s CE, for example, a Cenu Indian was incredulous when he heard that the Pope was to be seen as the “Lord of all the universe in the place of God, and that he had given the lands of the Indies to the King of Castile.” This Cenu man remarked, “The Pope must have been drunk when he did it, for he gave what was not his . . . [and] the king who asked for and received this gift must have been some madman for he asked to be given to him that which belonged to others.” 8 For this Cenu man, all lands belonged to the Great Spirit, which was lent to all creatures to occupy for a season, and thus could neither be bought, sold, nor owned. Any other view was a sign of either temporary or permanent insanity. Alas, it seemed that drunkenness and madness prevailed. For the Spanish and their later European imperialist rivals and successors did not hear the Cenu man’s comment, as they captured the lands, bodies, and god(s) of First Nation peoples, ironically in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Later, when these lands were actually colonized, and black Africans captured to work them, these same black Africans, learning from their fellow First Nations colonials, found other ways to religiously resist colonization. From the maroonage of the Maroons, to the cultivating of “garden” plots to grow and sell food produce in the pre-emancipation era, to the creating and occupying of post-emancipation “free villages,” to the building and attending of chapels and schools in the later colonial period—colonials were determined to have their “place in the sun.” Though they were deliberately and repeatedly set back through the devious, violent, and sometime brutal machinations of their colonial overlords, these persons were able to have a piece of the rock.

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Behind this material quest for ownership lay a theological understanding, namely, this was their Father’s world. They therefore had a right to be there, as co-owners of property. For these readers of the Scriptures, “the earth [was/ is] the Lord’s and the fullness thereof ” (Ps 24:1, KJV). The Most High, who had in Jesus told them “to occupy till He come back” (Luke 19:13, KJV), was the land’s owner. Such understandings therefore formed the hermeneutical background to uprisings such as the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865). After the latter revolt was brutally crushed, however, there developed an ambiguity toward resisting colonialism. Learning the lesson that the former plantation owners were not about to give up power or land easily or quickly, some decided that their owning of “this world’s goods” would be elsewhere. Thus, building on a previous viewpoint held by forebears during the time of enslavement—they adopted the posture that Africans should go back to Africa and own land there, for there, in that ancestral land was Eden, the primordial home. So whether it was Edward Bylden’s hopes for Liberia (the land of Liberty), or Marcus Garvey’s and his United Negro Improvement’s “Africa for Africans,” or Rastafari’s going “Back to Ethiopia,” the thrust was the same: resist colonialism by going b[l]ack to our God-given home and heritage. Others were more ethereal in their resistance. For them, “this world was not [their] home, [they were] just passing through.” They were looking for a home in heaven, not here on earth. Such persons interpreted the words of Heb 13:14 (“Here we have no abiding city, but we seek one to come”) in other-worldly terms. Revolts for land and possessions in this life were at best futile, at worst evil, and were therefore to be avoided. Despite this ambiguity, there remained those who saw colonialism as to be resisted in another way. Such persons saw the need for locals to continue in their quest for land and asset ownership, despite setbacks such as having their properties taken away in the aftermath of the above-mentioned Morant Bay Rebellion. Such persons were to become the founders and leaders of the movements in the Caribbean for self-determination, movements that lasted for the next one hundred years (1880–1980). For such persons, the Caribbean was the “New Jerusalem” of Rev 21 for which anti-colonials should work and worship, while colonialism was the “Babylon” of Rev 19, which would fall. Thus there were various attitudes to resisting colonialism that emerged in the immediate pre- and post-emancipation period. Some resisted colonialism in concrete terms, while there were others for whom resistance was more abstract. Resistance, if it happened at all, was a “spiritual” concept rather than anything that should be concretized. Such differing attitudes toward resistance continued throughout Caribbean theological history and continue to some extent to the present.

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Resisting Racism As has been seen, racism against black people was a lynch-pin of colonialism in the context of the Caribbean and the New World. That form of racism was resisted early on in the colonial enterprise. Somehow these “people of color” would not accept their “inferior” place in a “white” dominated world. One of the ways in which racism was resisted was in the way that African-descended people identified themselves as “Ethiopians.” This appellation came from their reading of Scripture where Ethiopia (also called C/Kush) and Ethiopians (C/Kushites) were indisputably present, prominent, and popular. These African-descended people cleverly recognized that Ethiopians were well respected in Scripture, and more importantly by those in the white racist societies who respected the Scriptures. When these Africandescended people called themselves “Ethiopians,” they were really saying to white racist people: “We are people of worth and value, and whether you think so or not, we know that to be true, for the Bible, God’s word and therefore God himself, says so.” Thus we find George Liele, the founder of one of the first black churches in the United States and the founder of the first black-led church and denomination in Jamaica, calling his churches (denomination) the “Ethiopian Baptist Churches of Jamaica” in 1783. This denomination was the first mass-based movement for people of color in Jamaica and was the foundation for all others to follow. It also started the end of miserable chattel slavery, not only in Jamaica, but also in the entire British Empire. 9 There were various texts which Liele’s and subsequent Jamaican AfriChristian movements used to demonstrate the worth and value of black peoples to skeptical and hostile Euro-Westerners (and not a few low-self-esteemed and self-hating blacks). One was Acts 8, which tells the story of the Ethiopian who is one of the earliest converts to Christianity. Another was the gospel story of Simon of Cyrene (Mark 15:21 para. Matt 27:32), who they took to be a black man from Africa, who helped Jesus to carry the cross. The pivotal text for these Afri-Christian movements, however, was Psalm 68:31—“Princes shall come from Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hand to God” (KJV). It was unanimously held as a proof text to show that God held black people in high esteem, had a special concern for them, and that African/black people had souls and could worship God for themselves, contrary to what the white colonial system said. Psalm 68:31 has a long history of use in African diasporic hermeneutics and was cited by many African and African descended Bible readers and hearers from the late eighteenth right into the twenty-first centuries. So whether it was the Marcus Garvey-led United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)—who virtually used this as a motto text in many aspects of its operations—or Rastafari’s usage of this text to justify Emperor Haile Selas-

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sie’s geographical and theological origin and vintage, Ps 68:31 was seen as the prime text for declaring worth and value of black people, who were seeking to resist anti-black racism in a white world. Resisting Slavery Enslaved persons sought to resist slavery whether they could read biblical texts or not. The Scriptures were not needed to provide a motivation for people to be free. However, when the Bible was taught and then given to such persons, they read it in such a way as to further their dreams and aspirations for liberation, seeking to effectively counter the readings of slaveholding hermeneutics. This was seen in perhaps what was arguably one of the most successful slave revolts anywhere, the Baptist War, which took place in Jamaica in 1831. It was led by Sameul Sharpe, a deacon of Burchell Baptist in Montego Bay, who was actually a pastor or “daddy” in his own right, since he was a leader of a set of underground congregations of “Native Baptist Churches,” as they were called. Sharpe’s significance in Jamaican history was that he organized and led a forceful, non-violent work strike. Though violently suppressed, it led to a speeding up of the abolition of the state of slavery throughout Jamaica and the rest of the then British Empire. This abolition partially took place in 1834, with “full free” taking place in 1838. Sharpe drew the clear inference that it was incompatible to be truly a follower of Jesus Christ and to be enslaved, or to enslave. So, if people, particularly those who called themselves Christians (as some members of the Jamaican plantocracy claimed to be), wanted others to do work for them, they must pay them. Indeed, some of his colleagues reported in the aftermath of the uprising that Sharpe had said that he organized the protest in the name of “the natural equality of man (sic), Scripture, and simple justice.” 10 Texts such as Gal 5:1 and 1 Cor 7:23 meant a lot to these freedom-loving exegetes. “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage” and “Ye are bought with a price: be ye not servants of men,” were often quoted and preached by and to enslaved Africans in their quest for liberty. But it was Matt 6:24, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon,” that was their favorite text. More than any other, it convinced them that Almighty God had come not only to set them free but expected them to play a vital part in gaining that freedom. The hermeneutics of Sam Sharpe and his collaborators were informed and transformed by praxis vis-à-vis slavery, colonialism, and imperialism that was both assertive and subversive. This “incarnation of Scripture” was a lasting legacy of these enslaved ones. For them, since the Word became flesh

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in Jesus, God’s Christ, they, as persons into whom the Word had come, had to express through, and because of, that Word their cry for justice, freedom, and respect. Future generations were to be inspired by how these enslaved ones, who were burning for freedom, enfleshed that Word, learning from them how to incarnationally resist other things apart from chattel slavery. 11 Resisting Classism Though chattel slavery was abolished all over the Caribbean by the early twentieth century CE, the classist societies, which had produced slavery, continued, and in some ways, became more intentionally and intently socially stratified. With such stratification and its theological behaviors regarded as normal and normative, it was extremely hard for persons on the receiving end to resist it. Largely, Caribbean peoples of different social strata lived in different worlds, interfacing constantly, really engaging the world/culture of each other only in those official areas such as politics, economics, and environmental crises (such as those caused by hurricanes and earthquakes). Yet, for the growing middle class of/in the Caribbean, this social “apartheid” was not good enough. Caught as they were in the middle, they desired equality with the upper classes. Both groups increasingly interacted with each other due to their mutual employment in the civil service, business, and education. The biblical exegetes among these increasingly secular(ized) middle class tried to find texts that could help them deal with the seemingly endemic classism in/of the Caribbean. Verses such as Gal 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ”) gave them encouragement in their drive toward class equality. It was a small drop in a great ocean, however, as social classism continued to be the order of the day, and in many cases, even after many countries of the Caribbean had become politically independent. Resisting Genderism Officially in the Caribbean from the time of colonialism to the immediate postcolonial period, women were seen as subordinate to men. Though boys were seen as subordinate to their mothers, who effectively oversaw their socialization, and who ran the households in which they grew, in the public sphere, men were expected to lead and be in charge of women. This was reinforced in areas such as employment, compensation, and relationships. Maybe because history is often “his-story,” written by men about men, there is a scarcity of material of persons biblically resisting genderism. Yet if a deliberate attempt is made to “engender history,” there can be found hermeneutists and exegetes who sought to show from the Bible that women are

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equal to men. One such Caribbean woman from the period of colonialism who read the Bible through the prism of resistance, and whose work remains, is Una Marston. Una Marston was a black Jamaican who was a poet, playwright, political activist, and feminist. She lived between 1905 and 1965, and operated between Jamaica, Britain, and the United States. Among her poems was one called “Getting the Spirit” (published in 1937, though written earlier). In it, she reflects on the promise of Joel 2:28–32 and fulfilled in Acts 2:1–21 in which a Goddirected Spirit caused equality between and among various persons, including between males and females. The passages speak of God’s pouring His Spirit so that “young men and young women would prophesy” (vv. 17–18), able to speak God’s word to God’s people. Interpreting this, Marston’s [implied] narrator prays to the Lord to give the child spirit and power, and to let her shout. Then, shifting focus to the child, the narrator assures her that God has sent “His spirit” and so, she could—and would—shout. 12 Here Marston reflects the desire and scripturally-grounded hope for patriarchal Christendom of the colonized Caribbean to be replaced by a more egalitarian spirituality. Alas it remains an unfulfilled prophecy while she was alive. But while it did not happen in her lifetime, Marston’s vision was to inspire a number of persons desiring gender-equality in the postcolonial generations. JAMAICA(NS) AND THE AMERICAN-LED CAPITALISTIC EMPIRE (1962–PRESENT) When Jamaica became independent in 1962, it was a signal moment. It was now probable that the majority of Jamaicans would come into the better and greater economic, social, and cultural benefits that were expected to accompany political independence. In the political-biblical hermeneutics of the day, Jamaicans, like the ancient Israelites, would be entering the Promised Land. But that dream did not hold much sway for long for a number of Jamaican lower-class black biblical interpreters. By the mid- to late sixties, the American capitalistic empire, long present elsewhere in the Caribbean, had begun to be experienced more and more by ordinary Jamaicans. This was because the United States sought to fill the geopolitical hegemonic vacuum left by the British and other declining empires. As such, some Jamaicans began to think that their situations had not changed in comparison to preindependent Jamaica. Again, “rereading” of the Scriptures, this time of a more aural and oral nature, came into play. A popular song of the day—Poor me Israelites 13—gives an idea of what the thinking was: it compares the daily grind of poor Jamaicans having to take care of the family in postcolonial Jamaica, to that of Jamaica—and ancient Israel—in the time of slavery. The comparison, indeed, the virtual convergence, of the Jamaican

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lower classes with ancient Israelites in Egypt is instructive: the fear, even threat, of increasing poverty (as epitomized by the wearing items of clothing), leading to a life of crime (as seen in the allusion to the legendary US robbers, Bonnie and Clyde) even more so. Such thinking emerged among the urban youth, who called themselves “rude bways (boys)” and on whom the culture of Rastafari had a profound influence. The evolving musical sound of these urban youth, called “reggae” by the late 1960s–early 1970s, became the vehicle of the Jamaican discontented; those of the urban youth, of Rastafari, and of the disillusioned lower middle class and the Black Power influenced middle class. The many songs of the period “fighting” against “Babylon” attest to such discontent, which was directed against the postcolonial condition as symptomatically embodied and expressed in Jamaican society. When the government of the mid-1970s became democratic socialist and a leader in Third World Affairs, again, the readings of those whose theopolitical ancestors had resisted colonialism, racism, slavery, classism, and genderism, now supplied the impetus for resisting the politics of the new empire. “Babylon” became (again) a code name for the entire Western dominated post/neocolonial order, as it was in the earlier period of Rastafari. Many of the classic anthems (such as Exodus) and icons (such as Bob Marley) come from this time and ethos. For even though reggae and Marley himself predated this era, the merging of Third Worldism with the Pan-Africanism of previous generations gave wider currency to the political biblical hermeneutics emanating from these sources. Suddenly, the resisting readings of Scripture by resisting Jamaicans became the voice of the damned of the earth (to translate Franz Fanon’s famous term more precisely): “Stepping out a (of) Babylon, into Jerusalem, in Mount Zion.” 14 The 1980s brought on a sea change. With the ascendance of middle and more right of center thinkers in positions of power in various parts of the world, such as Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom, Ronald Reagan of the United States, and Edward Seaga of Jamaica, those kinds of vocalizations ceased, or at least were submerged. Instead, biblical, indeed plural-scriptural rereading of health, wealth, and prosperity as signs of, and not just means to, salvation, became the norm. The interesting thing here was that such readings did not come from lower class black Jamaicans, but often from upper class white American televangelists, via newly acquired satellite dishes, VCRs, and color television sets. Often individualized and privatized in emphases, such messages were gladly received by a number of impoverished black Jamaicans who were beginning to lose the benefits of state subsidized benefits of one sort or another as a consequence of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank induced, “structural adjustment” programs the government of the day, though center-right, had to put into effect. 15

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Such readings of Scripture and their effects formed a large part of the diet of many Jamaicans by the time neoliberalism was fully introduced by the former democratic socialist, now turned to middle to right of center party, which became the government in 1989. This about turn was made complete by the ideological (and other forms of) eclipse of the Soviet Union and its allies, which spelt the end of the socialist dreams of many. That year, 1990, also symbolically saw the end of white domination in the entire African continent, signaled by the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. This fulfilled an explicit aim of the Pan-African, Third World ideology for which Jamaican popular voices had consistently campaigned. In being fulfilled, however, it also deprived those same persons of another major ideological plank in their struggle for space, respect, and justice. Thus from the beginning of the 1990s, Jamaicans have been in an ideological vacuum, or more accurately, have had nothing to choose from ideologically but neoliberalism. 16 No wonder that not a few lower-class black readers of the Scriptures, some of whom do not know the word neoliberalism but who nevertheless are feeling both the good and bad of its effects, are interpreting the era as the end of time, again highlighting their creative use of the Bible to make sense of their situations. 17 With the advent of the forced acceptance of the neoliberal project of globalization by Jamaican society, there has been the tendency for people’s lives, identities, relationships, and institutions to be dominated through the economic and ideological mechanisms of the market system. Put differently, the forced (greater) integration of Jamaican society into the global economy has prompted a necessary reconfiguration of Jamaican polity, economy, society and identity. Specifically, it has produced an economic, social, and political marginalization and (further) subordinations of the public, private, and civil sectors, generated an identity crisis, created an ideological eclipse, and exacerbated a state and sense of implosion and intermestic violence. In sum, the forced acceptance of the neoliberal project of “globalization,” though not without its merits, has undermined human agency potential, disempowering many for the benefit of a relative few. Such has been the Jamaican experience of “globalization” as I see it. In light of this, I believe that there is the need “to imagine new forms of grassroots political agencies” that are both local and global. 18 More precisely, there is the need to enable more Jamaican people to become empowered to resist and counter the economic, social, political, and especially ideological effects brought on by the neoliberal globalization project. What is needed is a perspective and ultimately a movement that will give (back) persons a sense of identity, provide a basis for ideology to combat/engage that of neoliberalism, and to deal with the sense and state of implosion and the concomitant intermestic violence. Such a task could itself become a unifying mission to bring cohesion of persons living in the same geographical space

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who are becoming increasingly fragmented as a result of this latest expression of world capitalism. The need for this movement is taking place at precisely the same time that there is the growing secularization, individualization, privatization, depoliticization, and fragmentation of historic Caribbean political theology. Most of these result from the American-led process and project of globalization. Consequently, the battle to scripturally resist empire is even harder than it was in previous eras. There, therefore, needs to be greater effort, including at the level of epistemology, to understand what is at stake if there is going to be real engagement and success. To this we now turn. Define and Refine 1. Defining and Refining Empire a. Defining empire: empire has been defined as the resultant territorial acquisitions of a hegemonic state. Such a dominating leading state by virtue of possessing many territories, has the ability to commandeer many peoples and their resources in order to benefit the elites and the core of their nations. An empire has traditionally been defined—and therefore resisted—in territorial and nationalistic ways. b. Refining empire: there is now, however, the need to refine what is empire now. It is the capitalistic empire, which in its current iteration, is more de-territorialized and less nationalistic than before. It is still led by the elites of America globally, and in the region, but is increasingly driven by others, especially China. 2. Defining and Refining Resistance a. Defining resistance: resistance has been defined in broad ways: • pro-hegemonic—where subordinated persons/nations are for the domination of hegemon(s) over them and others; • a-hegemonic—where it does not matter to subordinated persons/nations whether hegemons dominate them or others; • anti-hegemonic—where subordinated persons/nations are against the domination of hegemon(s) over them and others; • counter-hegemonic—a variant of anti-hegemony, it occurs where subordinated persons/nations are not only against the domination of that hegemon over them and others, but find alternative motives, means, methods and outcomes of governance to that of the hegemon(s).

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b. Refining resistance: there is the need to look at whether there is still the need for resistance and why, what is to be resisted, what kind of resistance, how and to what extent? • To a previous generation, such questionings would be unthinkable and unnecessary, as the need for and the type of resistance would be selfevident. And yet with the capitalistic empire being everywhere, in this increasingly interconnected world, it is easy to say with so many others “it is futile to resist” as “there is no alternative.” • It is our view that there is still the need to resist empire, and specifically the ethics of the capitalistic empire and their evil effects. This needs to be done in counter-hegemonic ways, clear blueprints to be acted upon, with constant evaluations and updating, and always with a view with “glocal” relevance. 3. Defining and Refining Scripture a. Defining Scripture: Scripture has been traditionally seen in the EuroWestern world as a Sacred Text, one whose very presence evoked the presence of the Divine. Consequently, the “[written] word of God” has almost been seen as magical, with many guilty of bibliolatry. In the context of the Caribbean, this Bible has primarily been the Protestant Bible (sixty-six Books consisting of Old and New Testaments). b. Refining Scripture: There is the need to refine what Scripture is. • For us, Scripture needs to be seen (again) as Sacred [Hi]Story, rather than Sacred Text (to reverse the historical making of the concept of “Scripture” itself), showing the workings of the Most High God (e.g., through Yahweh and Jesus) to bring about the theopolitical transformation and replacement of Evil Empire and its effects via the Empire [Kingdom] of God and its manifestations. • The Scriptures here would not only refer to the sixty-six (Protestant) books, but also the other books complied in so-called “silent 400 years” between the Old and the New Testament, which give crucial theopolitical information as to what happened in the Second Temple Period, and what led up to the Jesus Movement in and beyond romanized Israel. • This is vital, given the current and increasing Bible diversity, illiteracy, apathy, hostility, and irrelevancy in the Caribbean. As an inheritor of a rich heritage of fruitful political-biblical engagement, I commit myself to join with others in the ongoing engagement to scripturally resist empire in Caribbean and global society. A luta continua.

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NOTES 1. Cf. Phillip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998); Philip Curtin, The Rise and the Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge Academic Press, 1990). 2. A useful summary of the Christian religious influences in Spanish and British colonial Jamaica is to be found in Armando Lampe, Christianity in the Caribbean: Essays in Church History (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001). For the use of the Bible to “teach English and subordination” see Peter E. Roberts, From Oral to Literate Culture: Colonial Experience in the English West Indies (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1997). 3. Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 121–46. 4. From a sermon preached in 1902 by the British missionary, Rev. William Pratt, Pastor of the East Queen Street Baptist Church in Kingston, Jamaica (cited in Brian Moore and Michelle Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920 [Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004], 286). 5. See further, David M. Goldenburg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003). 6. See also Ronald Kent Richardson, Moral Imperium: Afro-Caribbeans and the Transformation of British Rule, 1776–1838 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987). 7. See also Diane J. Austin-Broos, Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Order (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1997). 8. Sylvia Wynter, “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk The King of Castle A Madman: Culture As Actuality, and the Caribbean Rethinking Modernity,” in The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the Hood, edited by Alvina Ruprecht and Cecilia Taiana (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1995), 18. 9. See Clement Gayle, George Liele: Pioneer Missionary to Jamaica (Nashville, TN: Bethlehem Book Publishers, 2002. 10. See C. S. Reid, Samuel Sharpe: From Slave to National Hero (Kingston, Jamaica: Bustamante Institute of Public and International Affairs, 1988), 68. 11. Cf. Reid, Samuel Sharpe. 12. Una Marston, “The Moth and the Star,” in Delia Jarrett, The Life of Una Marston: 1905–1965, 85–86 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998). 13. Desmond Decker and The Aces, Tougher than Tough: The Story of Jamaican Music, Disc 2 with Songs and Liner Notes (Producers Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, Birmingham, UK: Island Records, 1993); see also Kevin O’Brien Chang and Wayne Chen, Reggae Routes: The Story of Jamaican Music (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998). 14. See Chang and Wayne Chen, Reggae Routes, for the story behind this song, as told by its writer and singer, Marcia Griffiths, a member of Bob Marley’s backup group, the I-Threes. 15. For more on this story from the perspective of international relations see Holger Henke, 2000. Self-Determination and Dependency (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000). For more on the “health and wealth” gospel and its 1990s cousin “dominion theology” (see Bruce Barron, Heaven on Earth? The Social and Political Agendas of Dominion Theology [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992]). 16. For the ideological changes in the wider context of the Caribbean in the late 1980s into the 1990s (see Thomas Klak, Globalization and Neoliberalism: The Caribbean Context [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998]). 17. Based on surveys carried out by the writer of this article in urban and rural Jamaica in 1992 and 1995. 18. Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 158.

Chapter Ten

“Love Your Neighbor as Yourself” A Call to Resist and Transform Economic Empire Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Matt 22:37–9; see also Mark 12:28–34, Luke 10:25–28)

What love is and requires is the great moral question permeating Christian history. Two millennia of Christians, and the Hebrew people before them, claimed that God calls God’s people to receive God’s love and then “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5), and “to love your neighbor as yourself ” (Lev 19:18). This, according to a widespread understanding of the Christian story, is the human vocation: to receive and trust God’s love and to live that mysterious and marvellous love into the world by loving God, self, others, and—in more recent understanding—the entirety of creation. The words sound sweet and easy. But the reality is not. Three features of neighbor-love as a biblical norm render it a wild, empire-shaking, dangerous, and life-giving calling. First, neighbor-love as a biblical and theological norm pertains to whomever one’s life touches. In the context of globalization and climate change, this includes the sweatshop workers whose exploited labor lower the price of my clothing and household goods. My neighbor includes the villagers flooded out of their homes by the fury of climate-change related storms caused partly by my society’s fossil-fuel orgy, and my neighbors are indigenous people around the world whose communities and lands are destroyed by mining companies to provide the minerals on which life as I know it depends. Secondly, neighbor-love implies active commitment to the well-being of the neighbors. And finally, where people suffer under injustice, seeking their well-being entails 119

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seeking to undo that injustice. Said differently, neighbor-love as a biblical norm is inherently justice-seeking. The world of our day reeks with unthinkable injustice and the human agony that it causes. “Neighbors” whom we are called to love are ripped from their homes, stripped of their livelihoods, forced into slave labor or prostitution by a global system of finance and economy that will stop at nothing to secure ever more wealth into the hands of a very few. Entire cultures are destroyed, communities swept away, minds colonized, brutal wars fought, the oceans’ food chain threatened, and more devastation wrought in the name of maximizing profit and wealth accumulation for a few. Many people around the globe consider the political, economic, and military power structures that enable some to consume exorbitantly at the expense of others’ impoverishment and earth’s distress to be economic “empire,” with the United States at its center. To love neighbor—to seek neighbor’s well-being—entails resisting and seeking to transform this ungodly state of affairs. Enter now the stark reality of the church in the global economy today, the church after five hundred years of colonial history that began when monarchs of Europe together with church authorities constructed, in the name of God, a mandate—the Doctrine of Discovery—calling for “non-Christian peoples to be invaded, captured, vanquished, subdued, reduced to perpetual slavery, and to have their possessions and property seized by Christian monarchs.” 1 Colonialism continues today in another form, the neoliberal global economy. Known by some as corporate-and-finance-driven globalization, it continues to accumulate material wealth for a small minority at a terrible cost to many. The late African American theologian, Albert (Pete) Pero Jr., in discussing the church in the global economy put it starkly: “In ecclesiological terms,” he wrote, “if the church is the one universal body of Christ, this body of Christ is divided among active thieves, passive profiteers, and deprived victims.” 2 The reality is, of course, complex because many find themselves victim, thief, or profiteer. This is the context in which the church is called to justice-seeking neighbor-love in the footsteps of Jesus, a dark-skinned Palestinian Jew. What are practical implications of neighbor-love within the overarching reality of the early twenty-first century? This question is the focus of this chapter, and to it we respond in four steps: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Name and claim firm theological grounding (guideposts). Identify marks of the current moment (signs of the times). Explore faithful response through “truth-telling.” Note the gifts that the church brings to the world in this context.

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But first, honesty calls for a confession. I am located in the belly of the beast, the heart of the empire, the United States of America. I am a material beneficiary of financial and economic systems that devastate people the world over. In starkest terms, I am a part of systems that kill. Yet I stand also as one who seeks to be an ally with these people, and to resist and transform the systems that “feed” me by destroying their lands and lives. THEOLOGICAL GROUNDING God’s World-Changing Love The beginning point is God’s love. God—the creating, liberating, healing source—loves this world and each of us with a love that will not diminish, a love more powerful than all else, a love that hungers for all to have life and have it abundantly, and therefore seeks an end to all forms of injustice, including empire. We human creatures are created and called to recognize this indominatable love, receive it, relish it, revel in it, and—most important of all—trust it. After showering us with God’s justice-seeking life-saving love, God bids us to live it into the world by loving self, others, and God’s beloved creation. The truth of this love is the breath-taking claim of Christian faith. Neighbor-Love Has Radical Economic Implications A fervent cry permeates the history of God’s people from the Hebrew prophets through to our day: God’s call to love neighbor as self is a call to resist and transform systemic economic exploitation because it is a sin against vulnerable neighbors. Hear what St Basil (329–379 CE) of the Greek church is remembered to have said: Which things, tell me, are yours? Whence have you brought your goods into life? You are like one occupying a place in a theatre, who should prohibit others from entering, treating that as his own which was designed for the common use of all. Such are the rich. Because they preoccupy common goods, they take these goods as their own. If each one would take that which is sufficient for his needs, leaving what is superfluous to those in distress, no one would be rich, no one poor . . . The rich man is a thief.

Hear also what St. Ambrose (340–397 CE) of the Latin church said: How far, O rich, do you extend your senseless avarice? Do you intend to be the sole inhabitants of the earth? Why do you drive out the fellow sharers of nature, and claim it all for yourselves? The earth was made for all, rich and

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Cynthia Moe-Lobeda poor, in common. Why do you rich claim it as your exclusive right? The soil was given to the rich and poor in common—wherefore, oh, ye rich, do you unjustly claim it for yourselves alone? Nature gave all things in common for the use of all; usurpation created private rights. Property hath no rights. The earth is the Lord’s, and we are his offspring. The pagans hold earth as property. They do blaspheme God.

Echoing this strain a millennium later, Martin Luther denounced aspects of the emerging capitalist economy that exploited the poor, and he admonished preachers to do the same. 3 He taught that economic activity is intrinsically an act in relationship to neighbor, and all relations with neighbor are normed by one thing: the Christian is to serve the neighbor’s well-being, while also meeting the needs of self and household. Speaking of the “free public market,” Luther declares, “Daily the poor are defrauded. New burdens and high prices are imposed. Everyone misuses the market in his own willful, conceited, arrogant way, as if it were his right and privilege to sell his goods as dearly as he pleases without a word of criticism” (my italics). 4 Luther’s words cut at the heart of predatory capitalism. Luther taught that widely accepted market practices that undermined the well-being of the poor ought to be actively rejected by Christians. For example: Christians, according to Luther, must refuse to charge what the market will bear when selling products, if so doing jeopardizes the well-being of the poor. Likewise, Christians may not buy essential commodities when price is low and sell when it is high, for so doing endangers the poor. 5 (Whoa, is not buying low and selling high the cornerstone of the investment strategies that continue to accumulate so much wealth in the hands of a few?) As alternatives, Luther established norms for everyday economic life that prioritized meeting human needs over maximizing profit. Luther in fact argued that economic activity should be subject to regulation. “Selling,” he writes, “ought not to be an act that is entirely within your own power and discretion, without law or limit.” Civil authorities ought to establish “rules and regulations,” including “ceilings” on prices. 6 (Again, what a striking repudiation this is to the deregulation frenzy raging through the world of finance since the early 1980s.) Calvin, in a similar vein, declared, “any means which we use to enrich ourselves at the expense of others should be regarded as theft.” 7 Theft, he explained, has many forms, one of which is to takes a person’s property using legal means. Today in the throes of economic empire—as in the days of Basil and Ambrose, Luther and Calvin—serving the well-being of vulnerable neighbors calls for reshaping economic life along the lines that these faith forbearers admonished—meeting needs and protecting life over maximizing profit. Said differently, love calls us to reshape economic principles, policies, and

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practices so that in producing and consuming food and energy, creating shelters, trading goods, working and playing, the ends of economic justice and ecological well-being are served. Or, in other words, we are to create the social conditions that enable abundant life for all. Called to the Impossible What a paradox! God calls God’s people to seemingly impossible paths. Yet, God equips them for that journey. Reshaping the global economy seems impossible; the systems are so complex and mighty, and we are so fallible and finite. Moreover, we are in bondage to sin, including social structural sin. We will not love perfectly with justice-seeking love this side of death. We are—in Martin Luther’s words—God’s “rusty tools,” not God’s bright and shiny perfect tools. How are we—ordinary people—to reshape global economic empire? How are we to generate economic justice in the face of advanced global capitalism? Precisely here in our own inadequacy, the paradox of our identity in Christ is life-giving. It assures us that, while we are indeed wound up on structural sin, we are at the same time the body of Christ on earth, bearers of God’s Spirit, a power of just-seeking love more powerful than anything in all creation. As bearers of that Spirit, we will participate in God’s work to build a world in which all can flourish. We will grow ever more apt in the ways of justice-seeking love that challenges economic empire. Our text—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself ”—read in the Greek reveals this hope-filled paradox. In this pivotal text, Jesus is not only instructing people in what they should do. He also is declaring what they will do. The verb agapao is in the future indicative. This is the case in all three synoptic gospels (Matt 22:37–39; Mark 12:38–34; Luke 10:25–28). Likewise in the Pauline epistles, “you shall love” is expressing, in the words of New Testament scholar Matthew Whitlock, “assurance in the fulfillment” of this declaration. 8 This assurance is profoundly hope-giving, particularly as heard by contemporary people caught up in webs of structural injustice from which it is hard to imagine escape. In responding to the question of this chapter (What does it mean to heed God’s call to neighbor-love in the context of twenty-first-century economic empire?), these then are theological guideposts: • We are called to embody God’s love as justice-seeking neighbor-love. • Neighbor-love has economic implications. • Called to the impossible, we are equipped to move toward it.

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MARKS OF OUR TIME Responding to our question must attend not only to theological guideposts but to salient “marks of our time.” There are two marks to consider: Climate Sin Many now recognize that through climate change, humankind—or rather the high consuming part of humankind—is threatening the conditions for life on earth. Less widely recognized, however, is a corollary point of soul-searing moral import. It is this: the horrific consequences of climate change are not suffered equally by earth’s people. Nor are the world’s people equally responsible. Those least responsible for the climate crisis are suffering and dying first and foremost from it. The race and class dimensions of climate injustice are stark. Caused overwhelmingly by the world’s high-consuming people, climate change is wreaking death and destruction first and foremost on impoverished people who also are disproportionately people of color. The island nations that will be rendered unlivable by rising sea levels, subsistence farmers whose crops are lost to climate change, and coastal people without resources to protect against and recover from the fury of climate related weather disasters are not the people largely responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. 9 Nor are they, for the most part, white. 10 Some time ago, I was invited to India to work with church and seminary leaders on matters of eco-justice. They gently taught me to re-see climate change as climate colonialism. “Climate change,” declared a high-level Indian church leader, “is caused by the colonization of the atmospheric commons . . . the powerful nations and the powerful within [them] continue to extract from the atmospheric commons disproportionately. In that process they have emitted and continue to emit greenhouse gases beyond the capacity of the planet to withstand. However, the . . . communities with almost zero footprint . . . bear the brunt of the consequences.” 11 Global warming renders dry places dryer and wet places wetter. With drought—in food vulnerable areas—death stalks. Oxfam’s “Climate Change and Food Security” declares: “one of climate changes most savage impacts on humanity” will be increased hunger. 12 The World Bank warns that drought-affected areas will increase to around 44 percent of global cropland by 2100 with sub-Saharan Africa hard-hit, and in South Asia, “crop production . . . is projected to decrease significantly with climate change.” 13 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—regularly compiling the world’s most widely respected body of scientific research into climate change—links global warming to “breakdown of food systems.” Let it sink in: when food is very scarce, if “free market” rules govern food prices, the

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poorest starve. Recall, if you will, the voices of Saints Basil and Ambrose, and of Luther and Calvin. Add to this the rising seas that could threaten more than 25 percent of Africa’s people and drown some island states and low-lying coastal areas. 14 This means hundreds of millions of climate refugees. 15 No less alarming: desertification, which will strike hard in the Arab world and southern Africa, provokes war. This was a factor in the Darfur conflict. That some cause climate change, while others suffer most from it, is but the first layer of the travesty. Jesus cries out: “Have you not eyes to see?” Christians—freed in Christ to love our neighbor—are called to see more deeply. The second layer of climate colonialism is no less horrific. Climateprivileged societies and sectors—like the United States—may respond to climate change in ways that protect them from its worst impacts while relegating others—the most “climate vulnerable”—to devastation. 16 The third layer I learned from India: measures to reduce carbon emissions designed by privileged sectors may further damage “poor and marginalized communities.” 17 To illustrate: food is lost when crops go for biofuel instead of food. In short, the climate crisis reinforces the very forms of injustice that neighbor-love calls us to dismantle. Yet the cause of this disaster is the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels, especially by high consuming societies such as mine, the United States. While the national carbon footprints of India and China are rising to rival the United States, their per person carbon footprints do not even begin to match that of the United States. 18 These are soul-shattering realities of climate sin embedded in economic empire—the economic policies, practices and assumptions that undergird life as we know it in advanced global capitalism. I shudder at the implications for proclaiming the gospel. The church is called to proclaim the good news that God loves this world with a freely given life-saving love, and the church claims to be a servant of this love. For Christians of the global north to continue in ways of living that destroy lives and livelihoods through our greenhouse gas emissions is to obscure our proclamation of the gospel in our day. However—and this is crucial—an alternative, justice-making response to the climate catastrophe is utterly possible. This crisis could catalyze far more equitable, democratic, and compassionate ways of living and organizing our life in common. If Jesus’s call to love neighbor as oneself has any meaning today—and it does—it is to insist with prophetic fervor and fierce love that humankind’s response to the climate crisis serves the good of the vulnerable. That is, neighbor-love will work toward climate justice rather than furthering climate injustice. Never before have the stakes in heeding the call to neighbor-love been so high.

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Denial Many people, including many Christians in my context of the United States, continue to deny the devastating impacts of life according to the mandates of advanced global capitalism. The excessive consumption and wealth accumulation that fuels this system and feeds on exploitation are assumed by many—but not all—to be a “good life.” Given these marks of the time, our question becomes more specific: Where economic empire hides as “good,” how are Christians of the highconsuming world called and empowered to embody neighbor-love by moving toward economic justice wed to climate justice? TRUTH-TELLING We stand at a testing point in history: Humankind hovers on a precipice. On one side is the current path of empire breeding economic violence and climate disaster in which those least responsible for climate change suffer first and foremost its deadly consequences. The other side is the potential before us: a world in which all people have the necessities for life with dignity and earth’s ecosystems flourish. This requires truth-telling. The embodied Word of God, the logos, the living Christ, is the truth (John 14:6) . . . and the truth will set us free. Lutheran Brazilian theologian Vitor Westhelle points out that in New Testament Greek, the word for truth is alētheia. The prefix “a” denotes a negation of lēthē, which means oblivion or concealment. The word alētheia therefore means the denial of oblivion. The Word of God—the living Christ—undoes oblivion and concealment; it reveals or tells the truth. A primary role of the church—as body of Christ—is to speak truth and call people to live it. What truths does God call today’s church to tell that will set us free, free from being victimized by injustice and free from perpetrating it? I suggest three forms of truth-telling. What Is In my context, many US citizens do not want to admit that our lives depend upon economic empire and the suffering it causes. We do not want to see what Bishop Bernardino Mandlate of Mozambique so eloquently declared (addressing the UN Preparatory Committee for the World Summit on Social Development), that “the food of American children is covered with the blood of African children,” or what Floresmila, a strawberry picker in Mexico announced to a US delegation I was leading: “Our children go hungry because this land that should grow beans and corn for them, grows strawberries for your tables.” We run from acknowledging that the climate change to which our way of living contributes drives people from their homes and

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lands. From truth like this, people of economic privilege flee. We escape into moral oblivion, denial, powerlessness, or privatized morality. The challenge is to halt that flight. Failure to utter and hear this truth is one reason why the beneficiaries of financial and economic empire fail to resist it. A first step in dismantling systems of empire that enable some to consume at the cost of others’ lives is unmasking what Bonhoeffer called the “great masquerade of evil disguised as good.” 19 Facts and figures alone do not convince people who benefit from empire to see the truth. Yet the stories and lived experience of people who suffer under empire’s power will. And the church is called to tell this truth. What Could Be The second freeing form of truth is “what could be,” alternatives in the making—alternatives to economies of empire. The church of Christ holds a vision—a biblical vision—of a world in which all have the necessities for life with joy and peace. We are called to live according to that vision in the realities of material life on earth. Doing so means being firmly grounded in earth’s physical reality. Earth as a biophysical system cannot continue to sustain advanced global capitalism. This is not in the first place a political or moral opinion. It is a statement about physical reality. This point is central. Earth cannot physically continue to support the global economy as we know it today. This form of economy requires and presupposes: 1. “freedom” for global mega-corporations to maximize profit—including profit from environmentally devastating and humanly cruel practices; 20 2. a consumption orgy in much of the Global North fueled by a brilliantly creative and strategic advertising industry that convinces people to fill life with stuff, including stuff that damages health and well-being. Just imagine, for example, the massive CO2 emissions and water loss in the production of Coca-Cola on land taken from communities in India and then the transport and disposal of Coca-Cola bottles around the world; 21 3. spreading that consumption around the globe in order to ensure markets; 4. growth unqualified by moral values at tremendous cost to vulnerable people—understood as both necessary and good. (This demands privatizing many things once considered public in order to profit from them. Water is an example.) And 5. maximizing use of fossil fuels.

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The physical problem is that earth does not possess the unlimited goods and services—such as climate regulation, fresh water, and soil—to continue with these economic rules. The future holds different economic rules and systems. 22 The economic order that we assume as a given—advanced global capitalism—will not be in the future because earth’s resources cannot do it. That is the physical issue. We return now to the matter of faith and gospel. And there is good news. While humans have no choice whether economic life will change, humans will determine in what direction it will change. Enter here God’s ancient gift: two rules for economic life. The first, given in Genesis, is to abad (serve) and shamar (protect) garden earth. The second—heard first in Leviticus and later in Jesus’s words—is “to love your neighbor as yourself.” Neighbor-love and creation-care are betrayed by maximizing short-term profit, growth, consumption, and fossil fuel use, as doing so means: 1. abuse of human beings as tools for profit; 2. using impoverished people’s water, land, and seeds to generate profit for others; 3. prioritizing profit and growth over the lives of many impoverished people and over the health of earth’s life-systems; and 4. extracting as much oil, gas, and coal as possible. I am not saying that profit and economic growth are bad. Economic growth is vitally necessary in many nations. I am saying that growth and profit must be subservient to economic justice, human well-being, and earth’s viability. Nor is this a stand against business. It is a firm stand for business that is not compelled to maximize profit, that does not violate the rights of a citizen, and that is accountable to a triple bottom line: financial, social, and ecological. And it is an appeal to business to become an active force for economic justice and ecological restoration. Nor am I talking about impossible ideals, because economic systems are constructed by human decisions and actions, therefore, they can be reconstructed. To love your neighbor in the age of climate catastrophe includes reconstructing economic life, and that is a radical challenge to economic empire.The faith community worldwide has been doing so, for over four decades, in the creative work of groups and movements that challenge economic empire and construct life-giving economic alternatives. They are everyday people working for change at all levels of social being. The church is called to engage all the more fully and courageously in this prophetic work to build just economies. This work includes multiple forms of action. I think of these varied forms as ten fingers in the hands of radical engagement. They include:

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• lifestyle changes (for people who overconsume); • economic advocacy (e.g. boycotts, shareholder advocacy, buying goods that are produced without exploitation, buying locally produced goods, socially responsible investing); • public advocacy to influence policy and resource allocation; • community organizing campaigns; • education and consciousness-raising; • public witness such as demonstrations and protest (the Lutheran Palestinian bishop emeritus, Munib Younan, calls this “evangelical defiance”); • economic alternatives, such as small and local business alternatives to global corporations, community supported agriculture, and so forth; • direct service to people in need; • theological education and Bible study; and • worship and prayer. Each element alone seems so terribly inadequate. In concert, however, they are a force that can challenge empire. Let us dwell a moment on one of those “forms of action”: worship. The church claims that Christian worship forms and empowers believers to heed God’s call. Worship does this in part by enacting an epic story in which we are players. If indeed the moral life of worshipers is formed in part by an epic story told through the process of worship, then what epic story is “told” matters. What if the story we told in the sermon, songs, sacraments, and art highlighted the Christian heritage of resistance to imperial power? What if the practice of worship taught our children that they stand in a long line of courageous resisters who stood up against empire even at cost of life: the daring midwives who rescued Moses from the Pharaoh’s deadly hand, Jesus and the early martyrs who refused to comply with the Roman Empire’s demands, the abolitionists challenging slavery, the “righteous gentiles” who defied Hitler’s death machine, and so many more in the family of faith around the globe and throughout the ages. What if our children frequently heard sermons such as that preached by one of my pastors: “I could empathize with Paul in prison,” she declared, “because last time I was in prison, I too was in solitary confinement.” She had been jailed many times for protesting the Trident nuclear submarines stationed near Seattle. What if our congregations were morally formed to see themselves as walking in the footsteps of fiercely loving resisters? What if the story told, including us as characters, truly honored our rich heritage of resistance to imperial powers where they demanded people to transgress God’s commandment to love God and to love neighbor as self ? Telling this story would not be too strange, for that heritage is at the heart of Christian and Hebrew Scriptures. Were this story told in worship, might we be on more

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fertile ground for love that renounces all forms of injustice including economic empire? Indeed, telling the truth that viable life-giving alternatives to economies of empire are present and growing is a second form of faithful truth to which the church is called. God’s Presence Brings Fullness of Life for All The third kind of truth-telling is witnessing to the power and presence of God’s Spirit coursing throughout the created world, working within us, among us, and beyond us to overcome all forms of oppression, enabling life and love ultimately to reign over death and destruction. The Jesus Movement—that is, the church—throughout the ages and the continents has not only a vision of what could be but also practical steps toward realizing it. The Jesus Movement also bears a promise. God’s dream will be fulfilled. The power of God liberating creation is stronger than all else. Devastation is not the last word; in some way that we do not grasp, the last word is life raised up out of death. God “will not allow our complicity in . . . evil to defeat God’s being for us and for the good of all creation.” 23 We have heard the end of the story. In the midst of suffering and death—be it individual, social, or ecological—the promise given to the earth community is that abundant life in God will reign. So speaks the resurrection. In all honesty, I do not know what this promise means for us and for earth’s community of life. It does not lessen our call to build a more just, compassionate, and sustainable world; it does not, that is, allow us to sit back and let God do the work. That conclusion would be absurd, because God works through human beings. Nor does resurrection hope ensure our survival as a species in the face of climate change. It does ensure that God, who is above, beyond, under, and within all, ultimately will bring all to the fullness of life. We are to live trusting in that resurrection promise. Neighbor-love is thus a spirituality as well as an ethic. Biblical faith teaches that we are not only called but also empowered by God to love neighbor—including through economic policies and practices. We are empowered by the presence of Christ and Holy Spirit abiding within us. In short, humans grow in neighbor-love because God, whose tender justicehungry love will bring in God’s reign of abundant life for all, is incarnate within and among us. A ROLE OF THE CHURCH The church is not alone in its call to neighbor-love, its denunciation of the rich oppressing the poor, and its call to reshape life along the lines of justice

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and earth’s well-being. Other faith traditions as well as secular traditions seek similar ends. It may be useful, therefore, for us to note the unique configuration of gifts the church brings to the table of this great interfaith pan-human endeavor, recalling that our great weaknesses may also be gifts. The church bears this confounding combination of realities: • Its preposterous composition (ontological reality) of being both the brutalized and the brutalizers—the “active thieves, passive profiteers, and deprived victims.” • Its historic culpability in so many forms of oppression throughout church history. • Its mandate to communal repentance and lament as necessary ingredients of social healing. • Its historic trajectory of resistance to systemic domination (from the midwives who saved Moses through resisters of our day). • The promise of forgiveness for even the most heinous of crimes. • Its bottom-line claim that the Holy One is a force of justice-seeking earthhonoring neighbor-love and calls us to receive and pass on this love. • Its biblical claim that this Holy One is in active solidarity with the oppressed. • The unquenchable conviction that ultimately the power of life in God will prevail over all death and destruction. These factors together may breed power that we have not yet fully realized— power for resisting empire and for rebuilding more socially just and ecologically sane alternatives. CONCLUSION At this (testing) point of human history something new is asked of humankind: to forge ways of living that vastly diminish the mounting gap between those who have too much and those who have too little, and that serve and protect garden earth. This means challenging and seeking to transform economic empire. Where something new is asked of humankind, something new is asked of religion: to plumb the depths of our traditions for wellsprings of moralspiritual vision, hope, wisdom, and courage, and offer these to the broader public. The call to love neighbor as self, as revealed in Jesus, is a profound contribution that Christian traditions bring to the world. We have asked: What are practical implications of neighbor-love embedded in the overarching determining realities of the early twenty-first-century economic empire in

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the form of the neoliberal global economy that produces vast economic violence and ecological devastation? In response we took four steps: 1. naming and claiming firm theological grounding in the form of four guideposts; 2. identifying marks of the current moment; 3. exploring the sacred calling to truth-telling as an act of neighbor-love; and 4. noting contributions of the church to this great moral-spiritual challenge of our time. As we work to counter empire and to participate in God’s work of bringing abundant life for all, may the Spirit of the living God grant us the humility, wisdom, courage, and hope to hear and heed our calling to justice-seeking earth-honoring neighbor-love on this beautiful and broken planetary home called Earth. NOTES 1. http://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/executive-committee/2012-02/ statement-on-the-doctrine-of-discovery-and-its-enduring-impact-on-indigenous-peoples. 2. Albert Pero, “The Church and Racism,” in Between Vision and Reality: Lutheran Churches in Transition, edited by Wolfgang Greive (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 2001), 262. 3. Martin Luther, “Admonition to the Clergy that They Preach against Usury,” Weimar Ausgabe 51, 367, cited in Ulrich Duchrow, Alternatives to Global Capitalism (Utrecht: International Books, 1995), 220–21. 4. Martin Luther, “Large Catechism,” in The Book of Concord, edited by Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000). 5. Martin Luther, “Trade and Usury,” in Luther’s Works 45, edited by Helmut Lehmann and James Atkinson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1962), 247–51. 6. Luther, “Trade and Usury,” 249–50. 7. Cited in Francois Dermange, “Calvin’s View of Property,” in John Calvin Rediscovered: The Impact of His Social and Economic Thought, edited by Edward Dommen and James Bratt, 33–52 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 35. 8. Matthew Whitlock, in private conversation. Whitlock goes on to explain that Paul, in Galatians 5:14, sees Leviticus 19:18 as a promise fulfilled in Christ and in the Church. 9. As recognized by the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, climate change “represents the gravest of threats to the survival” of some island nations. (See http://sustainab ledevelopment.un.org/futurewewant.html). 10. The 40 percent of the world’s population whose lives depend upon water from the seven rivers fed by rapidly diminishing Himalayan glaciers are largely not white people. 11. Private conversation with the Exec. Secretary of the National Council of Churches in India, Rev. R. Christopher Rajkumar. 12. Oxfam International (5 September 2012). 13. World Bank, Climate Change Report Warns of Dramatically Warmer World This Century, 2012 (http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-change-reportwarns-dramatically-warmer-world-this-century), xxiii. 14. M. Juma, “Security and Regional Cooperation in Africa: How Can We Make Africa’s Security Architecture Fit for the New Challenges,” in Climate Change Resources Migration:

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Securing Africa in an Uncertain Climate, edited by Heinrich Böll Foundation, 16–25 (Cape Town: Heinrich Böll Foundation Southern Africa, 2010). 15. Even the target of 2°C warming, discussed at the recent summit, may be a death sentence for some island peoples. Yet, warns the World Bank report, “we’re on track for a 4 degree warmer world.” As global warming approaches and exceeds 2°C, there is a risk of triggering nonlinear tipping elements. Examples include the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet leading to more rapid sea-level rise, or large-scale Amazon dieback drastically affecting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy production, and livelihoods. 16. “Climate vulnerable” refers to nations and sectors that are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. As defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , “vulnerability” refers to “the degree to which a system is susceptible to, or unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change.” IPCC Working Group 2, Third Assessment Report, Annex B: Glossary of Terms ( 2001), http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/glossary/tar-ipcc-termsen.pdf. I use “climate privilege” to indicate nations and sectors most able to adapt to or prevent those impacts, or less vulnerable to them. 17. Soumya Dutta, Soumitra Ghosh, Shankar Gopalakrishnan, C. R. Bijoy, and Hadida Yasmin, Climate Change and India (New Delhi: Daanish Books, 2013), 12. This study notes that climate change has “two sets of impacts” on vulnerable sectors. One is the actual impact of climate change. The “second set of impacts originates from actions that our governments and corporate/industrial bodies undertake in the name of mitigating climate change. This includes large-scale agro-fuel and energy plantations in the name of green fuel . . . extremely risky genetically modified plants (in the name of both mitigation and adaptation to climate change), more big dams for ‘carbon-free’ electricity,” and more. 18. The US carbon footprint per capita is the world’s largest (Center for Environment and Population, 2006. US National Report on Population and the Environment (https:// www.ecocycle.org/files/pdfs/Eco-CycleEnvironmentalFacts.pdf). 19. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Ten Years After,” in Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1997). 20. This “freedom” is ensured by “deregulation” and so-called “free trade agreements” begun in full force in the 1980s. 21. Again, the examples are endless. To note one: The Earth Policy Institute estimates that the amount of oil used to produce plastic water bottles may now exceed 10 million barrels each year—enough to power 600,000 cars. 22. As declared recently and quite surprisingly in Forbes: “Corporate capitalism is committed to the relentless pursuit of growth, even if it ravages the planet and threatens human health . . . we need to build a new system (Drew Hansen, “Unless it Changes, Capitalism will Starve Humanity by 2050,” Forbes Feb 9, 2016 [http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhansen/ 2016/02/09/unless-it-changes-capitalism-will-starve-humanity-by-2050/#2a30e5274a36]). 23. Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), 249.

Chapter Eleven

The Bible Globalized Commodity in the New Strategies of Neocolonialism Nancy Cardoso Pereira

This chapter addresses the advances of globalized capitalism, acknowledging its neocolonial agencies—economy, wars, intensive extractivism, and strengthening of Christian cultural and religious organizations. In particular, the new global advance of fundamentalist Christianity puts the Bible as moral reserve of the West in the proselytist counterpoint to other modes of faith outside the influence of North Atlantic Western Christianity/capitalism. If the strategy of the missionary agencies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had the Bible as a book of study and devotion, in the strategies of neocolonial Christianity the Bible is merchandise that moves billions of dollars and assumes, at the same time, a belligerent strategy that animates conservative-patriarchal contents and a fashion strategy to consolidate the Bible as an icon of consumption with symbolic power that dispenses interpretation. The resistances of a liberating reading of the Bible must be radicalized and updated. RELIGION OF CONSUMPTION The challenge of this chapter about the interrelation of Scripture and empire might find an immediate answer in the set of studies, investigations, and journeys of which I take part in Latin-American readings of the Bible—in academic terms and in the popular reading of the Bible—from my pastoral work with grassroots groups, especially from the struggle for land in Brazil. Empire, imperialism, and all the words that follow the description of the 135

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situation of life in the peripheries of capitalism are present and in constant dialogue and confrontation with the biblical literature among us. This immediacy of the biblical text in the praxis of liberation theology was and remains vital in two ways: in the confrontation of Christianity’s participation in the mechanisms of oppressive power and in living the faith of resistance from the grassroots groups, Christian or not. This immediate response—which would take me quickly to the prophets, Exodus, the apocalyptic hope, or the radical methodology of the gospels— would need, in my way of looking at it, to receive also a discerning look from the outside, that is, that the Bible be considered as “material-cultural object in the capitalist period of Western civilization, especially in relation to the commodity culture of the consumerist society.” 1 I take a methodological step back and look at the marketing phenomenon of the Bible as an object of consumption in global capitalism (well developed by Carroll with theoretical and bibliographical references). I want to visit critically the place of the Bible in the intense, orchestrated, and violent movements of Western capitalism. This distancing is difficult since by acting and living inside Christianity and the reading and research of the Bible my relation to the “object” makes up at the same time my participation in the Bible-centered culture of the West, but also creates the conditions for the critique not just internal to the text but also of the place occupied in the Western metabolism. No theory, not even that which is true, is safe from perversion into delusion once it has renounced a spontaneous relation to the object. Dialectics must guard against this no less than against enthusiasm in the cultural object. It can subscribe neither to the cult of the mind nor to hatred of it. The dialectical critic of culture must both participate and not participate in culture. Only then does she or he do justice to her or his object. Globalized Capitalism Globalized capitalism advances and deepens its imperialism through the agencies of intervention—wars, financializing of the economy, intensive extractivism of nature, biotechnological control, political destabilization of areas of resistance, and massive mediatic and ideological presence. It is in this framework of unceasing intervention and exploitation that we must identify and recognize also the agencies of Christianity as part of the mechanisms of dispute of the hegemony by the North Atlantic Western capitalism. The financialized global capital does not have the commitment with productive processes or with the national territories. It invents for itself an immateriality, consolidates the invisible hand of the market as a metaphysical truth. This intended spirituality of capitalism borrows, kidnaps, or rents from Western Christianity.

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Capitalism has developed as a parasite of Christianity in the West (this must be shown not just in the case of Calvinism, but in the other orthodox Christian churches), until it reached the point where Christianity’s history is essentially that of its parasite—that is to say, of capitalism. The Christianity of the Reformation period did not favor the growth of capitalism; instead it transformed itself into capitalism. 2 The parasite belongs to its host, but not organically; it feeds from it, modifies it as well as captures some of its functions. The parasite-host image suggests a historical, dated relationship, but also a structural relation, since the host does more than simply favor the growth of the parasite; the parasite also adapts itself to the host, and so it no longer has autonomy. This imagery helps us to understand the agency of Western Christianity beyond the mechanical relations with capitalism and its cohorts. This requires a deep process of criticism, discernment, and radical engagement toward an anticapitalistic and liberating Christian praxis. Christianity and Capitalism The strategy of the Christian missionary agencies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had the Bible as a book of study and devotion that witnessed to Christianity’s presence in schools, hospitals, and other institutions of service that seek to modernize the colonized and peripheric societies. Nowadays, in the strategies of neocolonial Christianity, the Bible is merchandise that moves billions of dollars and assumes, at the same time, a belligerent strategy that animates conservative contents no longer in the framework of the modernization of local societies, but of reproduction of modes of consumption and life that equate capitalism with Christianity. If education was the important vector of the missionary model, what move the missionary strategies today are the communication and mediatic technologies and their marketing and advertising languages. Capitalism as a host drains the languages proper to Christianity and modifies even the organizational forms at the mercy of big economic groups in vital aspects, for example, the Bible that becomes part of conglomerates of mega publishers and medias. The bigger Bible publishers are owned by big conglomerates of nonChristian media. Thomas Nelson, with more than three hundred different types of Bibles and with control of 20 percent of the market of Bibles in the United States, was bought in 2006 by the private capital company InterMedia Partners VII. Zondervan, with a catalogue of more than five hundred different Bibles and with the control of 35 percent of the market, was bought in 1998 by HarperCollins, which is part of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

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Nancy Cardoso Pereira In addition to extending their control in one media sector by concentration, media corporations also followed another strategy—conglomeration . . . refers to a process of media ownership across the boundaries of one media sector. In this way medias industries are involved in (e.g.) cable channel companies, TV show productions and newspaper publishing. It allows them to not only produce their own content across different media outlets, but also to control the distribution of this content (vertical integration). It is self-evident that this capacity generates enormous advantages for market power and large profits. 3

The Bible “business” is growing and becoming more and more powerful. The annual sales are of forty million Bibles (English)—from study Bibles to Bibles of the family, and pocket Bibles. This does not include the foreign markets (two hundred million). There is a need created for consumption— and sustained by the market—of different types of Bibles. Some of the most popular study Bibles are projected to calm the readers regarding the precision and authorship of the text, at the same time promising an easy and pleasant reading. Rupert Murdoch presides over the News Corp media empire and also owns Zondervan, the world’s largest publisher of Bibles for twenty-three years, as well as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Zondervan, which is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, also sells Precious Princess Bible, Camo Bible (“Holy Bible” on a camouflage cover), Soul Surfer Bible, Holy Bible: Stock Car Racing, and five hundred other styles. The company owns exclusive North American print rights to the popular New International Version of the Bible, which it says has sold over three hundred million copies worldwide. 4 We had all sorts of Bibles: different translations, ones for different people groups (teenagers, women, seekers, those with the education to make use of the original language and the translation side by side), and in all sorts of packaging from software to metal cases to real leather. I remember noting the two forces at work: the impulse to make the Bible available alongside the motivation to make money. 5

With an eye on the market and another eye on the ideological disputes of interest to the West, it is possible to find aggressive marketing actions that make the Bible absorb the interests of the big companies more so than ever before. There is no critical content, in light of biblical prophecy or the good news of the gospels: rather, it is simply a process of accommodating the tendencies that function as domestication of polemic issues (in other words, manipulating the Bible as cultural inheritance that flies over all contemporary crises), for example, the climate crisis. A recent example is the Essential Bible Series, the world’s first carbon-neutral series of Bibles. Zondervan publishes a custom collection of Bibles created specifically for its consumers’ needs, and sold for a limited time exclusively at Walmart. The new line, called the Essential Bible Series, features premium quality Bibles that

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are also certified carbon neutral and satisfy the needs of shoppers seeking a more simple and accessible Bible for themselves or to give to others. “The Essential Bible Series is presented in a simple and personal way to help make Bible selection easy, so that consumers can walk away feeling confident that they have put the right Bible in their cart.” 6 Zondervan demonstrated environmental leadership among Bible publishers. We applaud Zondervan’s efforts to meet and exceed its customers’ increasingly high environmental standards. Bible-made-weapon The new global advance of fundamentalist Christianity takes the Bible as moral reserve of the West in the proselytist counterpoint to other modes of faith outside the influence of North Atlantic Western Christianity/capitalism. This identification immobilizes processes of inculturation of Christianity in local cultures and projects a model of global belonging that expresses itself in the form of spectacle, prosperity, and retribution. The place of production of the text does not demand any exercise of contextualization, but follows the most lucrative scripts and the busiest markets: Over the past 10 years, Amity has exported more than 50 million Bibles to more than 55,000 churches in 70 countries and regions. After seeing off major Asian competitor Korea with its high quality, low price and good service, Amity’s main rivals are now India, the Netherlands and Brazil in the global Bible business market. 7

The global market is very competitive and requires attention to the geopolitical displacements that follow military, political, and economic factors. Entering the battlefield, the Bible—allegedly—contains and is contained by Western values and will be part of the arrangements and advances against the “other” world, the non-Western, and they who lack or resist the biblical message. Let us try a little mental exercise: try and imagine a Europe without Christianity. Would we recognize our continent without church steeples, without crosses dotted along country roads, without universities and hospitals? Would we feel at home on our continent without human rights, without solidarity and care for the weakest? Probably not! When we speak today of the spiritual premises on which the modern state relies, but which it cannot guarantee, we speak of values that we owe to the Judeo-Christian culture. Everywhere the gospel spread (look at India, Africa or the poor regions of Latin America) one encounters this humanization of culture. 8

The mega-churches phenomenon reveals this displacement of ecclesiological models and the place of the Bible in the missionary presence. Even in secu-

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larized societies in the Christian West the biblical text is mixed with the general culture and will have its authority guaranteed not through the theological effort of the oikumene, but through the normativizing of the text with the supposed North Atlantic cultural answers. The launch by the US government of its Arabic language satellite TV news station for Muslim Iraq on 2 May 2003 in collaboration with the US-based fundamentalist Christian organization Grace Digital Media is a recent example of such an alliance. 9

The strategies of the media and publisher conglomerates compose the tools of intervention of the West and the dispute of the geopolitical and cultural hegemony is revealed concretely in the launching of satellites with Christian “vocation.” The SAT-7 is presented this way: WE ARE SAT-7 We support the Christians of the Middle East and North Africa in their Christian witness and lives. We beam the Good News of the Kingdom of God straight into people’s homes, into the centre of family life. We deliver Christian satellite television for the Middle East and North Africa. WE MAKE GOD’S LOVE VISIBLE. 10

In this vision of the Christian global media, the Middle East and North Africa are a complex part of the world where poverty, war, ethnic division, illiteracy, and political and religious oppression are a daily reality for millions. This evaluation despises any historical or geopolitical critique and deepens the prejudice already established in the Western common sense. Emptying those regions of the world and their populations of any protagonism or autonomy, those medias invest in an imagery of despise and extreme poverty that are applied by the non-adhesion to the civilizing model of Western Christianity. The Christian groups in those areas are presented in a victimizing way, awaiting the good news and protection coming from the Christian West. The majority of the population in Egypt and across the Middle East, however, cannot read. The legitimation of the interventionist process runs through the alleged moral and economic minority of those regions of the world, territories where Western capitalism disputes the geopolitical control and resources for the maintenance of the North Atlantic Western way of life. The references to the context do not elaborate this simultaneity of the military presence and religious presence; such a silence masks the real problems and contradictions of those regions and ends up editing the reality itself for local consumption. The strategy of working with local professionals is powerful but does not disguise the interventionist agency that is based in the self-proclaimed moral superior-

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ity of Christianity and its book of faith. In a special way, the Bible ends up being this reference above history, geography and conflicts . . . an almost unquestionable unanimity. The millenarian excesses reveal the total lack of synchrony between the bold use of communication technologies on one hand and the magic conservatism of the contents of faith broadcasted on the other. The Christian Broadcast Network founded by Pat Robertson: Why satellites? In their unique style, the Trinity Broadcast Network probably puts it best. Only satellites can allow “this Gospel of the kingdom” to be “preached in all the world as a witness to ALL THE NATIONS, and then the end will come.” 11 The formal discourse about the propagation of the gospel hides real interests of enrichment and the growing influence of sectors of Christianity making little difference if the adjectivation is liberal or conservative. The biblical contents are mere formality in the construction of the messages of those medias, expressing a freezing of the biblical materials and traditions and an enthusiastic activation of technologies and capacity of intervention. The technological sophistication does not hide the proselytist interests and the aggressive strategies that render unfeasible any dialogue or interaction between content and form, especially of the biblical contents that are considered preexistent, needing only a mediatic “warm up” to be served large scale. Mainstream Christian organizations use space technology for the same reason that the Christian Right does. Satellites are the cheapest way to reach the largest number of people with difficult-to-sensor broadcasts, especially in areas where ground-based infrastructure is poor or non-existent . . . This is “in a region where unemployment is rampant and large amounts of capital for business activities [is] difficult to obtain,” according to Sat-7. In the future, bibles and other books will be available for download via Internet connections over Sat-7’s satellites. 12

Advances in technology and communication technology have made it possible for the Word of God to spread to the far corners of the globe. Fundamentalism Stops Interpretation The fashion strategy is to consolidate the Bible as a consumer icon with symbolic power that exempts interpretation. The Bible as book-in-itself does not need to be a book-for-itself; as incontestable heritage of the Western world there are no longer big hermeneutical and exegetical struggles—which become exercises confined to academic scholarship. Religious fundamentalism is another edge of the same process of economic fundamentalism whose goal is the preservation of capitalism as a way of organizing life and maintenance of inequalities essential to the processes of exploitation and indebtedness. Capitalism is religion:

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Nancy Cardoso Pereira According to the religion of the capital, the only salvation lays in the intensification of the system, in the capitalist expansion, in the accumulation of goods, but this only aggravates the despair. It is what seems to suggest Benjamin with the formula that makes of the despair a religious state of the world “from which one should expect salvation.” 13

Fundamentalism is a way of ordering the world and the relations that situate itself in a place above society and its issues; it pretends to be an axis of stability and truth that disciplines everything and everybody. Outside of us and above us, there is a sphere of certainties allegedly infallible that regulates and legislates, that establishes the norms and patterns that only ask to be obeyed. Fundamentalism is, thus, stopping interpretation! The logic is simple: if there is a place of power and normativity above and outside us there is no need to run the risk of evaluation, the vertigo of decision is suspended, the innovation intentions are cancelled. It can be a Bible, a priest, a pastor, a religious marketer, a gospel singer and their truths. What is asked of us is obedience and the maintenance of imitative labyrinths. The human drama of having to choose is nullified—in the individualities, but also in the collectivities. Fundamentalisms are words against bodies, despite the bodies, through the bodies. The bodies need to be silenced in individual contexts, collective practices, and cultural or institutional arrangements: the bodies do not know, do not produce knowledge. There is no place for a contextual reading of the text, and the contextual conditioners of the text do not matter. Neither the feminist reading nor the black, the peasant, or the indigenous. What exists are Bibles for women—with diverse covers, textures, and colors; Bibles for children—with drawings that come with cute songs; Bibles for businessmen and so on; and so forth. This is what the fundamentalists fear: that the axis of oppression not articulated in our emancipatory struggles finds space and incentive in a biblical reading. [Intersectionality] stimulates the complex thought, the creativity and avoids the production of new essentialisms. This does not mean to state, however, that it is a “meta-theory” able to embrace all the fundamental issues, but that, exactly for its characteristics of theoretical malleability and ambiguity it offers an open field of new possibilities of research and intervention. 14

RESISTANCE TO THE BIBLICALTECHNOLOGICAL EMPIRE What then is the place of the Bible now? How do we situate liberating readings? Does this technological and interventionist avalanche have the last word? How do we articulate the resistance to imperialist capitalism and to

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the Bible-made-weapon without destroying with criticism the important part of the liberating Christian tradition that we share? The power of the communication and information means is real, articulated with other spheres of power (economic, political) and controlled by the national and global elites and their hegemonic equipment. Hegemony is here understood from Gramsci: For Gramsci, hegemony is a combination of moral, political, cultural and intellectual direction with domination. It is a supremacy exercised through consent and force, the imposition and the concession, from and among classes and blocs of classes and fractions of classes . . . it is built from civil society and its diverse institutions, but has in the State an indispensable instrument for its realization, consolidation and reproduction. 15

A critical stance about the means of mass communication under the influence of the School of Frankfurt develops a pessimist interpretative line, articulating elements from the experience of European fascism and the techniques of political propaganda as constitutive element of the mass media. 16 This stance in a certain way feeds from an elitism in the refusing of the technological forms of reproduction and of culture massification (photography, cinema, phonography, etc.). In this perspective, the means/media are identified with the technologies that distribute mass culture as dispersion of the spectacle of consumerism in the quick formula of pleasure and alienation. The thoughts of Adorno are relevant here: Adorno names as “cultural industry” the whole system of inclusion of culture in the production in series, so as the production of symbolic articles, which, in a strategic way, produce illusory needs. In order to do that, the author talks about the rationality of the industry in incorporating art as standardized goods and disperse it among consumers that, already conditioned, would have to enjoy as product the superficiality of the “industrialized art.” 17

In the context of Latin-American critical thought, the “strategic machinery of the cultural industry” 18 is taken and the social relations of power that structure the communication-and-information sector without, however, making invisible a perception of society’s structuring conflict that is also expressed in the forms of dispute for the spaces of access and control of the means/ media. Martín-Barbero insists in the maintenance of this space of analysis of the power relations and its mediations (widening the perspective of means/media) acknowledging that there are plural spaces of information-and-communication production, creation, systematization, socialization, and experience, which is also the space of artistic creation. 19

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Nancy Cardoso Pereira Communication, which has played a decisive role in the technological infrastructure of globalization as well as in the worldwidening of the neoliberal imagery and ideals of deregulation of the market and delegitimization of the public space and services . . . is presented in Porto Alegre as a place of a double perversion and a double opportunity at the same time. 20

Those cohabiting and simultaneous pluralities of perversion and opportunity compose the wider framework of the social forces correlating, influencing, and modifying each other. In this sense, a monolithic and orthodox view of means/media does not allow us to see the processes of class struggle and the active and creative forms of dispute for the nuclei of creation and social meaning. Commenting on the School of Frankfurt, Martín-Barbero points out: It smells too much as a cultural aristocracy that denies to accept the existence of a plurality of aesthetic experiences, a plurality of ways of doing and using art socially. We are in front of a theory of culture that does not only make art its only true paradigm, but that identifies it with its concept: a unitary concept that relegates the simple and alienating fun of any type of practice and use of art that cannot be derived from the concept, and ends up making art the only place to access society’s truth. 21

The important issue in the perspective of Latin-American critical thought is the displacement of means/media as techniques or companies to the space of mediations, overcoming the active-passive perspective of the transmitterreceiver relation. For Martín-Barbero, [the mediations] are this “place” from which it is possible to understand the interaction between the space of production and of reception: what is produced on television does not meet only the needs of the industrial system and the commercial strategies, but also the requirements that come from the cultural web and from the ways of seeing. 22

The question for the mediations prevents any monocausal perspective, and puts the communication-and-information processes in the set of cultural relations and social exchanges. By overcoming the alleged unanimity of the media equipment in the production and control of meaning, this interpretative model points out: [that] the receiver is not only a mere receiver of information produced by the communication means, [but it] is also a producer of meanings, [and] with this the author (Barbero) proposes a transdisciplinary study of the communication field, involving culture and politics. 23

So the resistance passes through the perception of the frailties and contradictions between content and means, and through the affirmation of the protago-

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nism of the poor in the processes of reception and reinvention of the models projected in an authoritarian way. The requirement from the concrete reality of the majorities requires higher precision of categories of analysis, but does not substitute the “action of the oppressed majorities” that was assumed as a place of experience. The Latin-American biblical reading assumes the life experience of the oppressed majorities as an epistemic and hermeneutical point. A distinction between departing point and motivation is important here. Taking the experience of the oppressed majorities as the departure point may reduce the experience of reality to exemplary cases without the real intervention in the construction of knowledge itself. If we understand the reality of the oppressed majorities as motivation, we should identify the materiality of this experience interfering and modifying the method, subordinating the exegetical procedures to the materialities of the experiences of the oppressed majorities. In this perspective the scientific procedures do not stay intact and the biblical scholar is no longer interested in the maintenance of the place of the Bible in culture and in the ecclesia. Christianity is a religion of a book, reading, literate people . . . in the fundamentalist method of literal repetition as well as in the historical-critical method of interpretation. In Latin America, the participation of the oppressed majorities, especially the peasantry, in the opportunities of education, is limited. The oppressed majorities are under-literate and more important, belong to a non-written world, that is—a world of cultural representation within which writing and reading are not hegemonic. Beyond systematic theologies, beyond dogmatics and metaphysics, beyond the text framed by methodologies, the popular reading of the Bible escapes the attempts of control and happens as language, unsewing the intentionalities of an oppressive evangelization/colonization project and mixing itself with other figures, other myths, other possibilities, and diverse rituals. More than a theology of the symbol that runs out in the identification of popular culture as a form of resistance, the challenge of a liberation theology is still the dissolving of ecclesiological and Christological borders, refusing any Latin-American Christian triumphalism and putting the Bible in relation again. Not the tidied and subtly violent syncretism of the inculturations that perpetuate the conversion and insertion of the sacred of the other in the tolerant ordering of Christianity. It means to perceive the religion of the Bible as one religion among others, in a plural way, decentered, fragmented and conflictual. This complex task is needed because the Latin-American popular reading of the Bible wants to keep the text alive, wet, speaking . . . beyond the methodological issues! In the relation between the seriousness of the methodological interventions and the mixed grace of alienation-resistance, the Latin-American reading insists in a liberating spirituality that does not require the sacrifice of the text in the reduction of its complexity, neither

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blesses the fetish of the religion of consumption . . . but accepts to live this mystique of disordering that orders the research without killing the text. That’s the miracle! The text becomes flesh in reality. This reality, cauldron of class and ethnicities struggle, forces the text to show its conflicts: the peripheric peasantry, the imperialism and its power abuses, the daily life of poverty (hunger, madness, illness), the marginality and the abandonment of women and children, the reinvention of forms of living together and sharing. NOTES 1. Robert P. Carroll, “Lower Case Bibles, Commodity Culture and Bibles,” in Biblical Studies, Cultural Studies, edited by Cheryl Exum and Stephen Moore (Sheffield: JSOT, 1998), 47. 2. W. Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion” (2010, http://www.rae.com.pt/Caderno_wb_ 2010/Benjamin%20Capitalism-as-Religion.pdf). 3. Ineke Feijter, “The Art of Dialogue: Religion, Communication and Global Media Culture” (2007; https://books.google.com.br/books?id=gq2yJFu3EUAC&pg=PA324&lpg= PA324&dq=Robertson’s+Christian+Broadcasting+Cable+Network+Murdoch&source=bl& ots=7YDd-7gmTt&sig=q6X264jYwvXYcZsBf7sZbcdex0E; accessed 20/11/2016), 323. 4. Will Braun, “Rupert Murdoch: Bible mogul” (http://geezmagazine.org/blogs/entry/ rupert-murdochs-big-bible-business/), n.d. 5. Chaplain Mike, “The New Battle for the Bible” (Part 1; http://www.internetmonk.com/ archive/the-new-battle-for-the-bible-part-1), n.d. 6. Carbon Neutral, “Zondervan to Release New Line of Bibles First at Walmart” (http:// www.carbonneutral.com/about-us/media-centre/zondervan-to-release-new-line-of-bibles-firstat-walmart). 7. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/826413.shtml. 8. Guido Horst, “What do we mean by ‘Christian heritage’? Europe4Christ” (http:// www.europe4christ.net/fileadmin/media/pdf/english/Letter_for_Europe_5.pdf; accessed 13 December 2016), n.d. 9. Pradip Thomas, “Christian Fundamentalism and the Media” (http://www., choike.org/ nuevo_eng/informes/3042.html), n.d. 10. https://www.sat7usa.org/our-work/watch-sat-7-live/sat-7-arabic/. 11. http://www.donaldfrobertson.com/religion_via_satellite.html. 12. https://www.sat7usa.org/our-work/watch-sat-7-live/sat-7-arabic/. 13. Michel O. Lowy, “Capitalismo como Religião” (http://egov.ufsc.br/portal/sites/default/ files/anexos/33501-43270-1-PB.pdf; accessed on 20 November 2016), n.d. 14. Cristiano Rodrigues, “Atualidade do conceito de interseccionalidade para a pesquisa e prática feminista no Brasil,” Internacional Fazendo Gênero 10 (2013) (Anais Eletrônicos, Florianópolis; http://www.fazendogenero.ufsc.br/10/resources/anais/20/1384446117_ARQUI VO_CristianoRodrigues.pdf; accessed on 20 November 2016). 15. Jorge Almeida, “A relação entre mídia e sociedade civil em Gramsci,” Revista Compolítica 1.1 (2011, março-abril; compolitica.org/revista/index.php/revista/article/down load/8/6, 121; accessed on 12 July 2014). 16. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialética do esclarecimento (Rio de Janeiro, 1985), 136. 17. T. Ramires, “Indústria Cultural e o Espetáculo: os contrastes teóricos entre a Escola de Frankfurt e os Estudos Culturais Contemporâneos, Revista Anagrama,” Revista Científica Interdisciplinar da Graduação 3.3 (2010): 2 (http://www.usp.br/anagrama/Ramires _espetaculo.pdf; accessed on 8 July 2014). 18. Ramires, “Indústria Cultural,” 3.

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19. Jesus Martín-Barbero, “A comunicação na educação” (2002; a_comunicac_o _na_educac_o_introduc_o.pdf; accessed on 14 July 2014). 20. Jesus Martín-Barbero, D os meios as mediações: comunicação, cultura e hegemonia. (Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 2003) (www.editora.ufrj.br/eCommerce/asp/livro.asp?idLivro=264; accessed on 13 July 2014). 21. Martín-Barbero, Dos meios as mediações, 82. 22. Jesus Martín-Barbero and Sonia Nunoz, 1992. Televisión y melodrama, Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Ed. Maria Aparecida Baccega. “Comunicação/Educação: Um campo em ação.” (http:// www.bocc.ubi.pt/pag/baccega-maria-comunicacao-educacao-campo-accao.pdf; accessed on 9 July 2014). 23. Luiza Ribeiro, “Jesus Martín Barbero e seus estudos de mediação na telenovela,” Comunicação & Informação 16.2 (2013): 39–49 (www.revistas.ufg.br/index.php/ci/article/ download/29187/1631; accessed on 10 July 2014).

Chapter Twelve

Scripture as a Site of Struggle Literary and Sociohistorical Resources for Prophetic Theology in Postcolonial, Postapartheid (Neocolonial?) South Africa Gerald O. West

In both the Jewish and the Christian canons, there is a separation between the Book of Judges and the Book of 1 Samuel, and in the Christian canons, the Book of Ruth is located between the Book of Judges and the Book of 1 Samuel. As “canon” these orderings and separations are sacred, constituting the received “final form” of “the Bible” for their respective faith communities. But these orderings and separations are not self-evident, as any careful reader of Scripture will attest. The story of the judges told in the Book of Judges continues into the Book of 1 Samuel; indeed, Samuel, one of the major characters of the Book of 1 Samuel, is the most “successful” judge in the long line of judges raised up by God. So why is Samuel assigned a different canonical place, separated from the other judges and redeployed as the anointer of kings? And why is the Book of Ruth in the Christian canons inserted between the Book of Judges and the Book of 1 Samuel, exacerbating the separation of what, to the attentive reader, is a continuing narrative? The short answer is that such canonical shaping is ideological; there is an ideological, or more accurately, an ideo-theological agenda to the shape of the canon as we have it. In this chapter my focus is on both offering an ideotheological account of the canonical shape of Judges-(Ruth)–1 Samuel and on arguing that for “southern,” “Third World,” “post-colonial” contexts the two primary methodological trajectories in biblical studies, the literary and the sociohistorical, must collaborate in order to serve socially engaged bibli149

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cal scholars and the local communities of faith they read with, enabling them together to discern the ideo-theological agendas of the canonical and precursor redactional “editions” and so to decide whether to read with or against their ideo-theological agendas. But I will begin with the canonical shape of Judges-(Ruth)–1 Samuel, not only because it is an obvious example among many more complex examples (such as the canonical shape of Amos), 1 but also because we have the theoretically and methodologically astute literary analysis of David Jobling on these texts to work with. By “we” I am referring primarily to socially engaged African biblical scholars and the communities of faith we serve, so I will preface my reflections on Jobling’s analysis with a few introductory comments on “African biblical scholarship.” 2 AFRICAN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP My emphasis in this chapter is on theory and method, with theory as the overarching conceptual scaffolding within which various analytical tools or methods are used. Within African biblical scholarship, the trajectory within which I do my work, there are well used veins of theory that govern our work, the most common being—in historical order—African inculturation theory (culture), African liberation theory (economics), African feminist theory (gender), African psychological theory (psyche), African postcolonial theory (identity), African queer theory (sexuality), and an array of intersectional combinations. 3 Within these theoretical frames African biblical scholarship has had a predilection for sociohistorical method, though there is a steady increase of interest in and use of forms of literary method. Since the 1980s, and the work of Itumeleng Mosala in particular, there has not been much of a prescriptive stance about method. An eclectic use of method tends to be the case in most examples of African biblical scholarship, with method serving the ideo-theological theoretical frames that connect African context—as the “subject” 4 of African biblical interpretation—and biblical text in a “tripolar” 5 meta-theoretical mediation. Mosala, however, was adamant about methodological capacity, arguing that sociohistorical resources were required if we were to discern the social struggles within the text, precisely because any signs of such struggle in the text were the product of actual real struggles in the communities that produced the biblical text. Mosala, whose biblical hermeneutics has made a decisive contribution to South African Black Theology (and to some extent all liberation theologies), 6 said it plainly in the late 1980s, making it clear that liberation theologies needed to be reminded “that the appropriation of works and events is always a contradictory process that embodies in some form a ‘struggle.’” 7 For Mosala, struggle is “always”; it is “struggle” all the

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way back and all the way forward; to riff on the linguistic turn that claimed “it’s words all the way down,” 8 for Mosala it is struggle all the way down. 9 He goes on, immediately, to characterize his own work in these terms: “I will argue that this struggle [specifically the socioeconomic struggle] is a key category in developing a biblical hermeneutics of liberation.” 10 Mosala was speaking in the 1980s into a South African context of massive systemic oppression by the apartheid state. The church, theology, and biblical interpretation had already been identified as “sites of struggle.” Yet the Bible itself had been left intact as an assumed site of liberation for the black and working class masses. 11 For Mosala, the Bible is only of use because, first, in the words of his colleague and fellow black theologian, Takatso Mofokeng, “the Christian religion and the Bible will continue for an undeterminable period of time to be the haven of the Black masses par excellence” 12 and because, second, Mosala’s historical-materialist analysis of the biblical text’s contending ideological voices offers potential kindred sites of struggle for black working-class Christians, “drawing from their history of struggle,” including their struggles against both African pre-capitalist and later white settler capitalist modes of production, 13 to “make hermeneutical connections with similar agendas in the contemporary setting.” 14 But, Mosala is quick to add, even “[w]ith the [ideological] agenda of the text laid bare,” “[t]he usefulness or otherwise of the agenda of the text cannot be decided a priori. It has to be tested on the basis of the demands and experience of the struggle of black working-class people.” 15 Mosala grounds his biblical hermeneutics in the actual struggles of contemporary working-class Africans. Real struggle, whether in the past, present, or future, is the terrain for the doing of black liberation theology. If contemporary working-class Africans do, through their struggle trained eyes, 16 “discover kin struggles in biblical communities,” then there is the potential, argues Mosala, that “[t]hese biblical struggles . . . serve as a source of inspiration for [their] contemporary struggles, and as a warning against their co-optation.” 17 The enduring problem, according to Mosala, is that the final form of the Bible we have and use is a form shaped by the dominant classes of particular historical periods in the Bible’s formation. Dominant classes have, through the redactional processes of the Bible’s composition— exemplified in Joblings’ analysis of 1 Samuel—co-opted the ideological perspectives of other social sectors. While ancient biblical “class” struggles may have been elided or co-opted by dominating ideological forces and their redactions, contemporary black working-class struggles are able to activate this ideologically “faithful” remnant. This is why contemporary struggles are the starting point of a black theology of liberation: “the poor and exploited [in their struggle] must liberate the Bible so that the Bible [which remains a significant ‘accessible ideological silo or storeroom’ 18 for them] may liberate them.” 19 So it is only by recognizing and appro-

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priating the Bible as itself a site of struggle that the Bible has the potential to become, in the words of Mosala’s theological comrade Takatso Mofokeng, “a formidable weapon in the hands of the oppressed instead of leaving it to confuse, frustrate or even destroy our people.” 20 Mofokeng argues that there is a long history within the church of “the weakest, neglected, poor and marginalised people” recognizing “the usefulness of the Bible as a book with a message of survival, resistance and hope,” giving them “a reason for hoping for a different future and believing in their right to a decent human existence.” 21 What this historical legacy offers us, continues Mofokeng, is a historical praxis that is “a new kind of struggle . . . namely, the struggle for the Bible or, to be more precise, the struggle for control of the Bible.” 22 While Mofokeng identifies this “new kind of struggle,” Mosala offers the tools with which to analyze how the final form of the Bible has already come under the control of dominant and dominating ideological sectors and how to identify and recover the voices of marginalized sectors within the biblical past. 23 With Jobling, I will argue in this chapter that there needs to be more deliberate collaboration between the literary and the sociohistorical if we are to engage critically with the ideo-theological agendas of the constituent editions or redactions of Scripture. This said, there should, I argue, be a priority of use with respect to the array of methods available. Though Jobling does not argue for his literary starting point, I do. In order for socially engaged biblical scholars to read with and among socially marginalized sectors, it is important to begin not only with the experienced realities of that sector, but also to reread Scripture in ways that are consonant with a collaborative interpretive process. Literary methods lend themselves to collaborative rereading work, both because the read text is a text that both scholar and ordinary Bible users share in common and because the heard text re-members the Bible aurally for its many oral/aural African “readers” as it resonates with other more local stories, and as such literary resources are the focus of this chapter. CONTENDING FORMS OF LEADERSHIP AND ECONOMY I now turn to offer a literary reading of the canonical form of 1 Samuel. Focusing on the beginning of 1 Samuel, Jobling notes that “the canonical division exerts tremendous pressure on scholars [and ordinary readers] to read the beginning of 1 Samuel as a new beginning—to read it forward rather than backward.” 24 The reading of the book tends to be shaped, Jobling continues, “by the assumption that the beginning of 1 Samuel coincides with the beginning of a new phase of Israel’s story—the rise of the monarchy—with a

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corresponding suppression of the question of its continuity with what went before.” 25 Jobling’s view is “that the canonizers wielded great power over subsequent reading precisely by making 1 Samuel into an introduction,” constructing a canonical shape that exercises power “over our reading, authorizing some ways of reading over others.” 26 If we do subvert the agenda of the canonizers and read backward (or if we have simply continued to read forward beyond the end of Judges, ignoring Ruth) we recognize that the literary patterns of Judges are continued into 1 Samuel. Indeed, as Jobling argues, the narrative of the capture of the Ark of the Covenant by the Philistines in 1 Samuel 4, the national ritual of repentance in which Samuel “judged the sons of Israel” (7:6), and the direct intervention of God against the Philistines on behalf of Israel under Samuel’s leadership, resulting in the defeat of this most powerful and persistent of enemies (7:10–14), only make narrative sense if we have read Judges 2:11–19 and followed its theological logic into 1 Samuel. What is more, in this climactic chapter, 1 Samuel 7, we are told on four occasions that Samuel “judged” Israel (7:15–17). Samuel, it would seem, is a dislocated (or relocated) judge. Jobling is attentive to the literary patterns of the Book of Judges (as we have it), noting that the period of the judges in Israel “is programmatically inaugurated by Judges 2:11–19, which summarizes the period as a series of repetitions of the following cyclical scheme”: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Israel falls into apostasy against YHWH. A foreign oppressor dominates Israel for a time. Israel appeals to YHWH. YHWH attends to the appeal and sends a judge to save Israel. The judge defeats the oppressor. During the judge’s lifetime Israel remains faithful to YHWH and is safe from external threat. 7. After the judge’s death apostasy is renewed and a new cycle begins. 27 This cycle begins in Judges 3:7–11, after the death of Joshua who exemplified and inaugurates this pattern (2:7–16), and continues through each of the others, including Othniel (3:7–11), Ehud (3:12–15a), Deborah (4–5), Gideon (6:1–8:32), Jephthah (10:6–12:7), and Samson (13–16). Jobling acknowledges the variations within this structured repetition, identifying a number of important thematic tensions, including the reality that not all the judges are exemplary leaders, that internecine conflict among the clans intensifies, and that continuity of leadership appears to be a significant problem. 28 Jobling argues that “extraneous material” not accounted for in his schema concerning the so-called minor judges can be understood as “an attempt to grapple with the problem of continuity.” 29 In these cases, there is an overt

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connective phrase, “after him,” implying that there is no gap, that each judge continues in the office of his predecessor, who could be a major or another minor judge. 30 This is in marked contrast to the pattern inaugurated by Joshua, where, there is no succession plan. No new leader is expected. In fact, “the sequence of events through which a new judge will eventually appear is set in motion only by Israel’s apostasy.” 31 Continuity of leadership, indeed leadership itself, is not always necessary, it would seem. Yet a concern for continuity persists within this pattern, explored in part through the stories of the minor judges and most fully by the account of Abimelech’s kingship (8:33–9:57), the remaining piece of Judges 3:7–16:31. The account of Abimelech’s kingship, Jobling argues, introduces “a form of national leadership that preserves [dynastic] continuity by definition.” 32 In order to achieve continuity, the initiating role of the divine in selecting Israel’s leaders is given up. This is clear in an earlier experiment, Israel’s first, with kingship, in the Gideon cycle of judgeship. Ironically, given Abimelech’s name, which means “my father is king,” it is Abimelech’s father, Gideon, who rejects monarchy. When the Israelites approached Gideon with an offer of hereditary rule after his victory over the Midianites (8:22), he refuses primarily because of the hereditary principle (v. 23). The ground for Gideon’s refusal is clear: Israel’s monarchy contradicts “the kingship of YHWH.” With the death of Gideon, it appears as if we are on track with the cycle Jobling has identified. The formula that announces the end of Gideon’s judgeship comes in 8:28—the Midianites are subjugated, the land is at rest (cf. 3:30)—and then a new judge cycle begins at 8:33 which sets off another cycle of Israel’s apostasy (8:33–34). 33 But chapter 9 ushers in a quite different story, one that advocates monarchic hereditary rule over both communal clan forms of hereditary rule and the non-hereditary non-clan-continuous form of leadership offered by the judges’ schema. The words of Abimelech to his mother’s clan are clear in both respects: “Which is better for you, that all seventy of the sons of Jerubbaal rule over you, or that one rule over you?” (9:2). Using monarchic logic to forge an alliance with his matrilineal clan, Abimelech “went to his father’s house at Ophrah and killed his brothers, the sons of Jerubbaal, seventy men, on one stone” (9:5a). Abimelech is then made (malak) king (melek) (9:6). However, Abimelech’s monarchic rule is short-lived as the schematic pattern of judges is reasserted, this time through a parable. No sooner has the narrator informed the implied reader that Abimelech has killed his brothers, than the very next sentence declares: “But Jotham the youngest son of Jerubbaal was left, for he hid himself ” (9:5b). When Jotham learns about this brother being made king, “he went and stood on the top of Mount Gerizim, and lifted his voice and called out. Thus he said to them, ‘Listen to me, O men of Shechem, that God may listen to you’” (9:7), invoking, it would seem

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from the judges schema, the cry of the people against domination. Jotham’s well-known fable (9:7–20) rejects Abimelech’s kingship as well as all forms of kingship, “suggesting that kings are parasites on the productive members of society.” 34 Jotham’s name is attached to the fable and, as Jobling reminds us, he is also a character in the narrative who alters the dynamics of the narrative. As a literary character, Jotham is the rightful heir to Gideon’s (legitimated) kingship. Within the logic of monarchic rule, Jotham’s survival seems to constitute a problem given that he is a surviving king. But a careful reading of the narrative shows that Jotham is not a textual embarrassment. On the other hand, he is a solution to the problem of how to remove a king: “Jotham in effect abdicates his claim, brings to an end Israel’s first monarchical experiment, and restores judgeship simply by disappearing!” 35 Jotham’s fable is a devastating rejection of monarchy as such. 36 From a literary perspective it is important, argues Jobling, that the narrator identifies his own voice with the voice of antimonarchical Jotham: “This is seen most clearly in Jotham’s statement that the people have not done right by Gideon (9:16b)” for earlier in 8:35 the narrator himself, in his own voice, said the same thing (8:35). 37 And if the implied reader has any doubt of the narrative point of view, the death of king Abimelech is a shameful death, brought about by a woman (9:53–54), and when Abimelech tries to fake his death as an honorable death, the narrator refuses to let him get away with the fake version. And if this is not sufficient by way of an ideological perspective against monarchy, a theological perspective is added at the end, with God referenced as the ultimate agent of the “re-turning” or “turning back” (shub, repeated) of the evil (raah, repeated) of this would-be king against both himself and his nepotistic supporters (9:56–57). The last judge cycle is Judges 17–1 Samuel 7. Reading on from the Book of Judges into the Book of 1 Samuel the cycle continues, albeit in a fragmentary manner. The persistent implied reader will find enough to recognize, as Jobling carefully explains, a parody of judgeship in the judgeship of Eli, who judged Israel “for the standard forty years” in a cycle that extends from Judges 17 to 1 Samuel 4:18. 38 Though the sequence of the judges schema “is delightfully muddled,” 39 it should be recognized as a parody. More significantly for our argument, “If in Eli judgeship is parodied at every turn, in Samuel it is vindicated and completed.” 40 In a cycle extending from 1 Samuel 4:19 through to 1 Samuel 7, “All six points of the judge cycle can easily be demonstrated in 4:19–7:17. 1 Samuel 4:19–7:2 is the gap between Eli and Samuel (points 1–3 in the cycle) while 7:3–17 brings Samuel back as judge (points 4–6).” 41 The debate, in narrative form, between judgeship and kingship expands in this section of the narrative to include two other forms of leadership. The narrative in Judges 17–18, Jobling notes, is about priestly leadership at the

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domestic and tribal levels, with some mention of national priesthood in Judges 19–21. 42 The opening chapters of 1 Samuel presents Israel’s national life as revolving around priests and the central sanctuary. In his summary assessment Jobling states, “The entire message about leadership by priests, both in Judges 17–21 and 1 Samuel 1–4, is that it is ineffectual or worse.” 43 Even when we might imagine that Samuel himself might become a priest, as the narrative interweaves his rise with the fall of Eli’s sons, he is established as a prophet (3:20–4:1) and in his next appearance he performs as a judge (1 Samuel 7). The textual voice that speaks on behalf of monarchy is not absent in the narrative from Judges 17 to 1 Samuel 7 (Judges 17:6, 18:1, 19:1, 21:25; 1 Samuel 2:10, 2:35). Though not the focus of the narrative, these “narrator’s asides” make it clear that the contestation about monarchy continues. Indeed, no sooner has Samuel’s judgeship been lauded, with his having defeated the Philistines (7:13), with the restoration of land (7:14ab), with his establishing of peace with the Amorites (7:14c), and with his doing his judgeship duty “all the days of his life” (7:15), than “the elders of Israel” lobby Samuel for a king (8:4–5). Significantly, both Samuel and God have harsh things to say about the economic realities of kingship (1 Sam 8:6–18), pointing out the many ways in which “the king will take” (8:11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17) from the people, leading ultimately to their enslavement (8:17). Samuel, the last judge, becomes the reluctant precursor to and anointer of the first king. But by 1 Samuel 12, which Jobling marks as the end of the Samuel cycle, “it is a kingship that nobody wants—Samuel, YHWH, and the people of Israel all agree that the demand for a king was bad.” 44 1 Samuel 12:16–19 is the climax: Samuel says that the people have acted wickedly, YHWH ratifies this judgement by supplying a miracle, and the people declare that “we have added to all our sins the evil of demanding a king for ourselves.” 45

The persistent attentive reader too has come to this point of agreement. Monarchy is contestable. So too is any form of hereditary succession, as is clear from a narrative point of view that juxtaposes Samuel’s nepotism (8:1–3) with the elders’ demand for a king (8:4–5). Indeed, though Samuel does go on to anoint Saul as king, even this clan-based minimalist form of monarchy, with the economic systems of monarchy yet to be established (in the narrative), is not celebrated in 1 Samuel 12. The “logic of kingship is subsumed . . . under the logic of judgeship.” 46 Given these kinds of argument, and Jobling’s analysis is both detailed and nuanced, Jobling postulates a pre-canonical form of the Book of Judges, which he calls the Extended Book of Judges (Judges 2:11–1 Samuel 12).

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This “book,” in Jobling’s analysis, “is heavily weighted on the side of judgeship.” 47 Though this book advocates judgeship over other forms of leadership and advocates a clan-based agricultural mode of production over a monarchic city-temple tributary mode of production, 48 we must recognize the limits of what is being advocated. There is very little textual detail how they ruled and how their economic system worked. But the Extended Book of Judges does offer an ideological trajectory, offering “indications of . . . an egalitarian society,” warning against economic and political exploitation. 49 “Israel,” it is clear, should not be “like other nations” (1 Sam 8:5, 20). As Jobling eloquently argues, “the postexilic Israel whose consciousness the biblical text expresses has forgotten its founding [egalitarian] ideal but continues to be haunted by it.” 50 A careful literary rereading of the canonical form conjures this haunting. CANONICAL CO-OPTATION Clearly, literary method indicates, there is contestation inherent in the canonical form. The canonical form deliberately adopts a particular ideological perspective, which is pro-monarchy both as a form of leadership and as the fulcrum of a centralized city-temple economic system. The first stage of canonization, which produced the Masoretic Jewish canon, separates the Book of Judges from the Book of Samuel (1 and 2 Samuel). The second stage of canonization, which produced the Greek and eventually the Christian canons not only separated the Book of Samuel into two books, but added its ideological perspective, affirming the Jewish monarchic canonical ideology by inserting Ruth between Judges and 1 Samuel. 51 The ideological effect of these separations and insertions is clear. “Readers are encouraged to see Samuel not as a judge and a vindicator of judgeship but as inaugurating the process that leads to the monarchy of David.” 52 The canonical ending of the Book of Judges, “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes,” uses the phrase “in those days” to reframe the whole period of the judges, and not just Judges 17–21. “The last words of Judges become a blanket judgement on judgeship as a system.” 53 In a second canonical step the insertion of the Book of Ruth co-opts the narrative logic of this story to legitimize the ideological logic of monarchy. The beginning of the Book of Ruth, “In the days when judges ruled, there was a famine in the land,” offers an implied negative appraisal of the period of the judges. And the ending of the Book of Ruth, with its invocation of David, points forward to the, by then, mythological ideal monarch. Indeed, as Jobling notes, this is the first reference to David in the LXX and Christian canons. “Ruth, we can even say, functions as a quasi-birth story of David, a

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highly positive one.” In the Christian canon the Book of Ruth is ideologically reconstructed as “a story of the move from judgeship to kingship.” 54 Judgeship is assigned a place with famine and death and monarchy is assigned a place with food and new life. In the canonical reordering, 55 the opening sentence of the Book of Ruth follows on in full agreement with the final sentence of the Book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (21:25), “In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land” (1:1a). The two sentences together convey the message that there was a famine in the land because there was no king in Israel. But by the end of Ruth there is a king in Israel, or at least the announcement of one. In fact the inclusion of Ruth and the creation of 1 Samuel result in a series of books that end respectively with (a) the urgent need for monarchy (Judges), (b) the announcement of the coming of David, founder of the “true” monarchy (Ruth), and (c) the resolution through Saul’s death of the problem of an alternative monarchy to the true one [this is, the monarchy of David] (1 Samuel). 56

This ideological “message” is woven into the final texture of the canonical form we have received. As we argued at the outset, “the canonical books exercise a power over our reading, authorizing some ways of reading over others.” 57 But, as Jobling’s careful work demonstrates, we do not have to follow the ideological grain of the canonical form. A close and careful literary rereading offers other avenues and other ideologies. What is more, a literary rereading of the final canonical contested form provokes (even ordinary) readers to delve more deeply into the sociohistorical realities of struggle that have produced the final form that we have before us. SOCIOHISTORICAL DECONSTRUCTION By beginning with the literary method, the sociohistorical task becomes our (collaborative) task even though it relies substantially on scholarly work. While redactional critical work, as envisaged by Mosala, is the terrain of the biblical scholar, ordinary African readers can accompany the socially engaged biblical scholar if they have already “seen” with their struggle trained eyes the contestation clearly evident in a literary reading-hearing of the text as they have it. Indeed, one of the reasons I have chosen the Judges-(Ruth)– 1 Samuel canonical construct is that contestation is so readily apparent. Socio-historical redaction analysis can then offer us access to the particular community-based struggles that have generated such a canonical construct. For example, in the case of the Judges-(Ruth)–1 Samuel corpus, Mark Brett uses historical analysis and sociological theory to delve into “the inven-

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tion of kingship in Israel” 58 focusing on the books of Samuel. Brett worries, in dialogue with an earlier version of this chapter, that my literary analysis presents contestation too starkly. His central worry is that “‘resistance’ has been valorized in a way that obscures a number of quite different sites of struggle.” 59 In particular, Brett probes what kinds of “nationalisms” might be legitimated as forms of “resistance” to empire. If 1 Samuel 8:11–17 is less resistance to local (northern) forms of monarchy (given the monarchic “social contract” in 1 Sam 10:17–27) 60 and more a polemic “directed toward imperial Assyrian kings,” 61 then certain forms of monarchic nationalism, whether sanctioning “collaborative politics” or “ethnic solidarity,” 62 are acceptable. Yet the contestation continues, for as Brett argues, 1 Samuel 8:18 “makes good sense as a [later] Deuteronomistic commentary on the disastrous consequences of the ‘social contract’ tradition of the northern kingdom as a whole,” 63 “a southern response expressed in prophetic mode: ‘[a]nd you will cry out in that day on account of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but YHWH will not answer you in that day.’” 64 Brett is right to remind us of the complexities of “real” social contestation, and of the difficulties in reconstructing the redactional editions that capture such contestation. But his work also demonstrates the presence of plenty of potentially appropriative detail within such sociohistorical analysis, particularly as we work collaboratively with African struggle trained eyes. For now, for example, I want to draw on Brett’s sociohistorical recognition that various forms of nationalism become acceptable when couched within anti-empire rhetoric. DE-NATIONALIZATION AND RE-NATIONALIZATION Analyzing our postcolonial and postapartheid South African context, Gillian Hart’s arguments can “usefully be understood in terms of simultaneous processes of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation that have been playing out in relation to one another in increasingly conflictual ways.” 65 And I have argued at length that public political appropriations of the Bible by our postcolonial and postapartheid South African state have enabled both de-nationalization (reconnecting postapartheid South Africa with neoliberal global capitalism) and re-nationalization (the production of the postapartheid “nation”). 66 In both instances the systemic political and economic detail of the biblical text, whether engaged at a literary or a sociohistorical level, are ignored. The Bible is read, instead, as having a moral message, aimed at both the individual “soul” and the collective “soul” of the South African citizenry. Ironically, the postcolonial, postapartheid liberatory state has formed a “bib-

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lical” alliance with what The Kairos Document (1985) referred to as “Church Theology.” 67 The rhetoric of postcolonial and postapartheid “struggle” has deflected us from recognizing how the Bible has been “captured” by forms of “Church Theology” advocated by both the South African state and the South African churches. Mosala was right. By not recognizing that the Bible was itself a site of struggle, the bulk of practitioners of South African Black Theology and South African Contextual Theology of the 1980s and 1990s failed to equip contemporary forms of “Prophetic Theology” with the capacity to resist the co-optation of the Bible by either post-liberation “State Theology” or “Church Theology.” “Church Theology” understandings of the Bible now characterize how the state and the churches use the Bible in the public realm of post-liberation South Africa. 68 However, if contemporary working-class Africans do, through their struggle trained eyes, “discover kin struggles in biblical communities,” then there is the potential, argues Mosala, that “[t]hese biblical struggles . . . serve as a source of inspiration for [their] contemporary struggles, and as a warning against their co-optation.” 69 The enduring problem, according to Mosala, is that the final form of the Bible we have and use is a form shaped by the dominant classes of particular historical periods in the Bible’s formation. Ancient dominant classes have, through the redactional processes of the Bible’s composition, co-opted the ideological perspectives of other more marginalized social sectors. A neocolonial reading is the result, as contemporary dominant classes in South Africa read the Bible with the ideological grain of both the ancient dominant classes and the dominant “moral” interpretive trajectory of the South African churches. CONCLUSION Literary methods, which have come a long way since Mosala’s antipathy to such methods, 70 offer the collaborative project of socially engaged biblical scholars reading with local communities of the poor and marginalized readerly access to the Bible as a site of struggle. And sociohistorical methods, though less readily accessible, deepen our understanding of the dimensions of those struggles. Crucial for contemporary South Africa, Mosala’s notion of the Bible as a site of struggle offers prophetic forces the resources with which to contend against both our postcolonial state and churches in their cooptation of “scripture” as a personal and moral tract.

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NOTES 1. Robert B. Coote, Amos among the Prophets: Composition and Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1981); Gerald O. West, “Redaction Criticism as a Resource for the Bible as ‘a Site of Struggle,’” Old Testament Essays 30.2 (2017): 525–45. 2. See Andrew M. Mbuvi, “African Biblical Studies: An Introduction to an Emerging Discipline,” Currents in Biblical Research 15.2 (2017): 149–78. 3. For a more detailed analysis of each of these theoretical strands, see Gerald O. West, “Africa’s Liberation Theologies: An Historical-Hermeneutical Analysis,” in The Changing World Religion Map: Sacred Places, Identities, Practices and Politics, edited by Stanley D. Brunn, 1971–85 (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, London: SpringerWest, 2015); Gerald O. West, The Stolen Bible: From Tool of Imperialism to African Icon (Leiden and Pietermaritzburg: Brill and Cluster Publications, 2016). For examples of intersectional theoretical work see Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2000); Makhosazana K. Nzimande, “Reconfiguring Jezebel: A Postcolonial Imbokodo Reading of the Story of Naboth’s Vineyard (1 Kings 21:1–16),” in African and European Readers of the Bible in Dialogue: In Quest of a Shared Meaning, edited by Hans de Wit and Gerald O. West, 223–58 (Leiden: EJ Brill, 2008). 4. Justin S. Ukpong, “Rereading the Bible with African Eyes,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 91 (1995): 3–14. 5. Gerald O. West, “Accountable African Biblical Scholarship: Post-Colonial and TriPolar,” Canon&Culture 20 (2016): 35–67. 6. For more detailed discussion of how Mosala’s work fits within South Black Theology see Tinyiko S. Maluleke, “The Bible among African Christians: A Missiological Perspective,” in To Cast Fire Upon the Earth: Bible and Mission Collaborating in Today’s Multicultural Global Context, edited by Teresa Okure (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications 2000), 103–4; West, The Stolen Bible, 318–62. 7. Itumeleng J. Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 32. 8. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xxxv. 9. “The category of ‘struggle’ at all levels and through various phases of black history should be taken as the key hermeneutical factor” (Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics, 6). 10. Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics, 32. 11. Kairos, The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa (Braamfontein: Skotaville, 1985), 1, 4 §2.1; Albert Nolan, God in South Africa: The Challenge of the Gospel (Cape Town: David Philip, 1988), 157; Gerald O. West, “The Co-optation of the Bible by ‘Church Theology’ in Post-Liberation South Africa: Returning to the Bible as a ‘Site of Struggle,’” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 156 (2017): 190–92. 12. Takatso Mofokeng, “Black Christians, the Bible and Liberation,” Journal of Black Theology 2 (1988): 40. 13. Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics, 183. It is important to note that Mosala does not see the indigenous African pre-colonial past as a struggle free period. “Class” struggle goes all the way back. 14. Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics, 185. 15. Ibid. 16. Itumeleng J. Mosala, “The Use of the Bible in Black Theology,” in The Unquestionable Right to Be Free: Essays in Black Theology, edited by Itumeleng J. Mosala and Buti Tlhagale (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1986), 196. 17. Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics, 188. 18. Mofokeng, “Black Christians,” 40. 19. Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics, 193. 20. Mofokeng, “Black Christians,” 40. 21. Mofokeng, “Black Christians,” 38. 22. Mofokeng, “Black Christians,” 39.

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23. For a detailed account of Mosala’s hermeneutical processes see Gerald O. West, Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation: Modes of Reading the Bible in the South African Context (Maryknoll and Pietermaritzburg: Orbis Books and Cluster Publications, 1995), 135–46; West, The Stolen Bible, 328–40. 24. For another take on reading the Hebrew text from left to right (or the English translation from right to left) see David J. A. Clines, “Reading Esther from Left to Right: Contemporary Strategies for Reading a Biblical Text,” in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 1967–1998, edited by David J. A. Clines, 3–22 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998). 25. David Jobling, 1 Samuel (Collegeville, MN: A Michael Glazier Book, The Liturgical Press, 1998), 33. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 43–44. 28. Ibid., 45. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 46. 33. Ibid., 47. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 49. 36. Ibid., 49. 37. Ibid., 50. 38. Ibid., 50–51. 39. See Ibid., 52–53. 40. Ibid., 51. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 53. 43. Ibid., 54. 44. Ibid., 60. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 65. 47. Ibid., 71. 48. Roland Boer, “The Sacred Economy of Ancient ‘Israel,’” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament: An International Journal of Nordic Theology 21.1 (2007): 29–48; Gerald O. West, “Tracking an Ancient near Eastern Economic System: The Tributary Mode of Production and the Temple-State,” Old Testament Essays 24.2 (2011): 511–32. 49. Jobling, 1 Samuel, 74. 50. Ibid., 75. 51. Ibid., 105. 52. Ibid., 106. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 107. 55. Phyllis Trible offers another way of reading the Christian canonical form, finding in Ruth’s location a “response by juxtaposition” in which female “study in hospitality” is contrasted with the violence of male inhospitality found in Judges 19 and its aftermath (Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives [Philadelphia: Fortress Trible 1984], 85). Jobling gives special attention to the women of 1 Samuel, locating Hannah as “a pivot point” for reading the women of Judges (and Ruth) and 1 Samuel (Jobling, 1 Samuel, 130). 56. Jobling, 1 Samuel, 107. 57. Ibid., 33. 58. Mark G. Brett, “Narrative Deliberation in Biblical Politics,” in The Oxford Handbook to Biblical Narrative, edited by Danna Nolan Fewell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 541. 59. Personal correspondence; Mark Brett has been a dialogue partner for more than thirty years, for which I am deeply grateful.

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60. Brett, “Narrative Deliberation in Biblical Politics,” 541–42. 61. Ibid., 544. 62. Ibid., 542. 63. Ibid., 545. 64. Ibid., 544. This “northern” (Israel)/“southern” (Judah) redactional contestation might be considered a form of “civil war,” to use a term Graham Adams invoked from the theological work of Andrew Shanks. See Adams’s chapter in this collection. 65. Gillian Hart, Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2013), 157. 66. West, The Stolen Bible, 453–63; see also Gerald O. West, “Religion Intersecting DeNationalization and Re-Nationalization in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Dynamics of Religion Past and Present, Proceedings of the XXI World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, Erfurt, August 23–29, 2015, edited by C. Bochinger, J. Rüpke, and E. Begemann, 69–83 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). 67. Kairos, The Kairos Document. 68. West, The Stolen Bible, 445–542. 69. Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics, 188. See Tat-siong Benny Liew’s chapter in this collection, which emphasised this dimension of a radical historicity, focussed less on the text’s origins and more on the text’s receptions. 70. Gerald O. West, Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation.

Chapter Thirteen

Views, Voices, and Choices Reading Readers of Luke-Acts and Empire Tat-siong Benny Liew

One of the earliest, though often forgotten, interdisciplinary works on Scripture and empire is The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique by the late Michael Prior. 1 Prior’s book is in many ways quite unique for a book about the Bible, given how it gives in wonderful and helpful details the colonial history of three very different regions of the world since the onset of modernity: the Americas, South Africa, and Palestine. 2 Prior is also careful to point out that the cause and facilitation of colonialism, which he characterizes as the experience of people being “turned into strangers in their own land” by quoting José Oscar Beozzo, 3 could not and should not be reduced to any single factor; however, Prior is at the same time insistent that the Bible did and continues to play a role in the colonial history and reality of these regions. 4 Looking at the colonial history of these three regions, comparatively, Prior concludes that colonialism often involves the fabrication of several myths, including “myths of origins” and other myths that cast a targeted area as a “virgin land” but the colonial selves not only as racially superior but also with a civilizing mission or a religious mandate. 5 Despite his choice to address first the colonization of Latin America and South Africa because they took place earlier (starting in the fifteenth and seventeenth century, respectively), Prior’s main critique is really Zionism of the twentieth century. In addition to giving Zionism its own set of “colonial myths,” 6 Prior emphasizes how the Zionist claim and occupation of Palestine were partly confused and justified by the narratives in the Hebrew Hexateuch that God has chosen and promised to give them land. For Prior, it is important that scholars of religion and people of faith acknowledge and confront the problematic nature of those biblical texts about the “chosen people” and 165

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the “promised land.” These texts, according to Prior, must not be taken literally as factual; they are, in Prior’s words, “stories” rather than “histories.” 7 Like myths and as myths, these stories are powerful and influential, especially when they are read as canonical Scriptures. 8 In Prior’s “moralliterary analysis,” 9 these exclusionary, nationalist, and xenophobic narratives from the Hexateuch give the violent and immoral mandate to annihilate the existing population in Canaan. In fact, they portray an imperialistic God. Unfortunately, Prior’s “moral critique” ends up promoting a kind of supersessionist reading of the Bible that reeks of Christian imperialism by focusing its first chapter on the “biblical traditions on land”—that is, the problematic promise and occupation of land in the Hebrew Hexateuch—but his penultimate chapter on the New Testament as the key remedy to “rehabilitat[e] the Bible,” despite his scattered admission that the Bible contains diverse, competing, and contradictory strands and traditions here and there. According to Prior, the New Testament not only effectively de-territorializes the Hexateuch’s focus on land with a new emphasis on a “citizenship in heaven” (Phil 3:20) and a heavenly city rather than earthly ones (Gal 4:25–26; Heb 11:13–15; 12:22; Rev 3:12; 21:2, 10), but also successfully transforms God’s election beyond the racial/ethnic and national(ist) categories of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament through its “universal” declaration (Rom 9:4). 10 In his argument about the “universal appeal” of the New Testament, Prior highlights, despite acknowledging that Acts has been used to justify apartheid in South Africa, Luke-Acts by pointing to (1) Peter’s lesson about not making any distinction between clean and unclean food and hence between different ethnic groups (Acts 10:28–35); (2) the Christian mission’s extension from Jerusalem “to the ends of the world” (Acts 1:8) and hence not being tied to a single, specific territory; and (3) the Lukan Jesus’s reinterpretation of Isaiah 61 and hence the doctrine of election through his references to Gentiles and pronouncement of good news for all who are oppressed (Luke 4). 11 Land is, of course, significant. We may, however, want to remember that the term neocolonialism is meant to point precisely to the continuation of colonial or imperial dynamics without the necessary or literal setting up of physical colonies through the occupation of foreign land. We may also need to remember that the diversity of strands and traditions within the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and within the New Testament effectively discredits the stark binary understanding that Prior ends up implying about his two testaments—or, at least, between the Hexateuch and Luke-Acts, since diverse thoughts also exist within each of these corpora. Furthermore, Prior’s conclusion about the New Testament, despite its diversity, undercuts his own assertion that the biblical text plays a more important and determinative role than the reader in the reading process. 12 Referring to the Bible, Prior writes, “It is the narrative itself, rather than the sophisticated exegesis of it, that has fueled

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colonial adventures.” 13 Immediately after his criticism of those who “exonerat[e] the biblical authors . . . by ascribing to the reader alone any morally dubious predispositions,” Prior quotes another scholar approvingly that “the Bible itself is a serious problem to people who want to be free.” 14 Given Prior’s argument about the reading process, in general, and LukeActs as an example to “rehabilitate” the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in particular, I will look at Luke-Acts to argue for the primacy of the reader when it comes to what the New Testament says or not says about colonialism, empire, and resistance. I will show that readers can interpret and have interpreted Luke-Acts as both for and against empire. In contrast to Prior’s suggestion that looking at the “predispositions of the biblical interpreter” is making the biblical text “non-problematic” and hence “evad[ing] the problem,” 15 I will show that what a biblical passage says about empire and resistance is indeed contingent on the assumptions and interpretations of— and thus resting on the shoulders and responsibility of—a human reader. DAVID W. PAO: LUKE-ACTS AND EXODUS As Prior points out in his reading of Luke 4, Luke is full of references to the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible. While David W. Pao’s focus is primarily on Luke’s second volume, Acts, he points to several parallel emphases in both Acts and (Second) Isaiah to argue for reading Acts as an “Isaianic New Exodus.” In other words, Pao argues that Acts is a rewriting of (Second) Isaiah’s rewriting of Exodus. These parallel emphases include (1) the restoration of God’s people through the gathering of Israel’s exiles and the power of the Holy Spirit (e.g., Isa 32:14–17; 40:1–4; 44:1–4; Luke 2:25; Acts 1:8; 2:8–11); (2) the power of God’s word (e.g., Isa 40:6–8; Acts 6:7; 12:24; 19:20); (3) the powerlessness of idols (e.g., Isa 40:18–31; 44:9–20; Acts 7:35–43; 17:16–34); and (4) a universal salvation that includes not only eunuchs but also Gentiles (e.g., Isa 40:5; 56:4–5, 8; Luke 3:6; Acts 8). 16 According to Pao, Acts as the Isaianic New Exodus also explains why the Christ-following cult in Acts is always called “the Way” (e.g., Acts 9:1–2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22). 17 While Pao himself does not push his work in this direction, his intertextual reading of Acts is full of tantalizing implications regarding empire and resistance. First, Pao’s reference to (Second) Isaiah and its emphasis on a “universal salvation” for both Jews and Gentiles means that what Prior calls the “universal appeal” of the New Testament is actually not limited to the New Testament. 18 Second, if the Isaianic New Exodus is, as Pao and other scholars suggest, a rewriting of Exodus because the Judeans, toward the end of their exile in Babylon, saw King Cyrus and his Persian Empire as God’s

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tools to bring about their deliverance, just as God once did to deliver the Israelites out of Egypt, 19 then one will have to conclude also that the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, or at least (Second) Isaiah, communicates a rather ambivalent attitude toward empire. Empire in (Second) Isaiah can cause both oppression and provide deliverance. Third, if Acts is a rewriting of (Second) Isaiah’s rewriting of Exodus, one will need to ask, in the context of Acts or Luke-Acts, if Luke saw the Roman Empire as oppressive like the Egyptians and the Babylonians before, or if he saw them, like the Persians, as being used by God to deliver the Christ-following communities. MARIANNE PALMER BONZ: LUKE-ACTS AND AENEID Since my focus is on how the primacy of textual meaning lies with the reader who reads rather than the text being read, let me be clear that readers can and do choose the intertextual frame with which they use to read Luke-Acts. Instead of referring to (Second) Isaiah as the intertext as Pao does, Marianne Palmer Bonz, in a book that was published in the same year as Pao’s, connects Luke-Acts with Virgil’s Aeneid. As Prior does, Bonz seeks to clarify the genre of the biblical text, which is Luke-Acts in her case. In contrast to Prior, Bonz suggests that seeing Luke as a historian does not necessarily imply the historicity of Luke-Acts. 20 After a long discussion regarding how Luke-Acts has been read as mainly a theological, literary, or historical document, Bonz suggests that Luke-Acts actually is best compared with the genre known as the Greco-Roman epic, which is characterized by not only its appropriation of the past and its universalization of human destiny but also its incorporation of “religion, drama, history, and even politics.” 21 Just as Virgil appropriated the great Greek epic tradition and created a continuation of Homer’s Iliad “to celebrate Rome’s divine election and elevate Romanitas (the Roman way) to ascendancy as the universal human ideal” at the beginning of Augustus’s accession to power, Luke, Bonz argues, appropriated the Septuagint to author a foundational epic for the early Christian community to proclaim the Christian way as the new “universal human aspiration” during the early success of the Christian mission among Gentiles when the church became separated from Israel. 22 Just as the Aeneid depicts the Romans as being ordained by the gods to rule the world out of the ruins of Troy, LukeActs has the Christ-following communities as divinely ordained to win over the world out of the disastrous First Jewish-Roman war and the destruction of the Jewish Temple. 23 In both cases, Bonz argues, we have in front of us an epic that explains and promotes a remnant of people who have been destined to exercise world dominion after coming through an initial setback, an experience of being dispersed, and a period of uncertainty. Luke’s Jesus—born in

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adverse situation but grew strong and wise, being favored by both divine and human beings, and with access to God’s guidance and power to fulfill God’s purpose and plan (Luke 1–2)—is read by Bonz as a typical Greco-Roman hero. This hero’s birth in Luke’s Gospel, Bonz further points out, parallels, follows, and overshadows the birth of John the Baptist, just as Acts will parallel, follow, and overshadow Luke’s Gospel itself: while the Gospel ends with the judgment of Jerusalem for opposing Jesus as God’s designated (thus signaling the First Jewish-Roman war as God’s judgment), Acts shows God’s plan of salvation being broadened and extended through the mission of the church. 24 For Bonz, the Pentecost story (Acts 2) is both the literary and the theological center of Luke-Acts, for it represents dramatically the Christian mission as not only having a divinely ordained origin but also resulting in a reconstitution of God’s people that expresses a theme of universalism. Consequently, the mission is being brought to receptive Gentiles despite—or due to—the internal debates, divisions, and disbelief among the Israelites. 25 When Prior tries to disassociate the narratives of the Hexateuch from history, he brings up an earlier suggestion that the story of Abraham might have been fashioned after that of Aeneas, the man from Troy who was divinely ordained to become the ancestor of the Romans, and so Abraham might be a fictional “retrojection of David” comparable to Aeneas being a “retrojection of pious Augustus.” 26 Like Prior and like Pao, Bonz does not tease out the potential implications of her work in terms of empire. Given the parallel she sees between Luke-Acts and Aeneid in both form and content, does Bonz understand Luke-Acts as Luke’s attempt to reject Aeneid and the Roman Empire or as Luke’s attempt to replace them with the church as the next, best empire? VIRGINIA BURRUS: LUKE-ACTS AND AMBIVALENCE We find an attempt to address or confront the question about Luke-Acts and empire in Virginia Burrus’s postcolonial reading of Luke-Acts. As Burrus insightfully points out, while the Roman Caesar does not appear as a character in Luke-Acts, the power of the Roman Empire hovers always in the background, especially in light of Luke’s constant and pervasive references to “various mediating ‘brokers’ of imperial dominion,” including imperial officers and soldiers as well as client kings and Jewish elite dependent on Roman support. 27 Situating Luke-Acts, therefore, squarely in the context of the Roman Empire, Burrus admits that Luke-Acts may be read as an apologist for the Roman Empire if one focuses on, for instance, its tendency to downplay Roman responsibility but blame the Jewish religious authorities for not only the crucifixion of Jesus but also the charges against Paul. Using

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Paul’s case as an example, Burrus suggests that the threats on Paul’s life can be read as being stalled and thwarted by the Roman officials and by Paul’s decision to appeal as a Roman citizen to Caesar (Acts 21–26). Furthermore, Paul seems to enjoy greater freedom to teach and preach about Jesus once he is under the custody of Roman officials, especially during and after his trip to Rome (Acts 27–28). The Roman Empire, then, may be understood as benign, or even as a regime that “mitigates the brutality of the ‘native’ priestly elite of Judaea and opens up providential space for an effectively ‘global’ (‘transnational’) community of believers.” 28 At the same time, Burrus acknowledges that there are also materials within Luke-Acts that can be read as subversive, if not downright oppositional, to Rome. Repeatedly, for example, Jesus or the Way of Jesus is presented in Luke-Acts as winning over centurions (Luke 7:1–10; 23:44–47; Acts 10), and hence as overpowering the representatives of Roman military power. Instead of using Jewish Scriptures like Pao or Greco-Roman writings like Bonz, Burrus refers explicitly to twentieth-century scholarship from outside New Testament studies as her intertexts. Citing James C. Scott’s well-known and well-used work on “hidden transcripts,” Burrus proceeds to question if what looks like Luke’s apology for Rome cannot be read as Luke’s “public transcript” to interrogate or taunt Rome’s purported values about “truth” and “justice” with its repeated report regarding Jesus’s innocence—often through the mouths of Roman officials (Luke 23:4, 13–15, 22, 40–41, 47). What is read by some as a benign regime, then, can be read by others as a heartless and indifferent regime that only cares about political expediency and hence operates with the desire to appease the crowds at all cost. Instead of shifting blame from one party to another, the portrayal of the interaction between the Roman officials and the Jewish authorities in Luke-Acts can also be read, Burrus proposes, as an exposure of the tense, delicate, and divisive nature of colonial politics. 29 Rather than choosing between a pro-imperial or anti-imperial reading of Luke-Acts, Burrus refers also to Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimicry and ambivalence to highlight the ambiguities in Luke-Acts and thus Luke’s ambivalence about the Roman Empire. 30 Like Bonz, Burrus also points to the question of genre, but Burrus’s point of comparison with Luke-Acts is not an ancient epic but the postcolonial novel. 31 For Burrus, the presence of Acts in Luke-Acts disrupts not only the genre of Gospel but also that of history. The leaky genre of this hybrid product is excessive and reaches across boundaries as empires do; at the same time, Burrus refers to the rise of novel(istic) writing during the Roman Empire as well as to the Bakhtinian understanding of novel as heteroglossic “parody of genres” to read Luke’s story of Jesus and the church as a “strategically flawed imitation” of the totalizing history that came out of imperial Rome. 32 This imitation and hence resemblance in terms of not only genre and value but also imperial sense and sensibilities,

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even if it is “strategically flawed” or “deliberately . . . mocked,” implies for Burrus a need for readers to be more ambivalent in their assessment of Luke’s ambiguous text in relation to empire and resistance. 33 Instead of feeling ambivalent, however, some readers of Luke-Acts may also choose to capitalize on certain aspects of Luke’s ambiguous text to stake a position for Luke regarding empire and resistance. In fact, Burrus’s own beginning sentence in her concluding section says as much. She writes, “The ambiguities of Luke’s ideological stance cannot simply be resolved into clarities, yet we have seen that Luke-Acts may nonetheless yield distinctly anti-imperialist interpretations.” 34 This is exactly what Rubén Muñoz-Larrondo does in his postcolonial reading of Acts. 35 Before we look at that, however, let us take a look at an opposing take that is not only no less distinct but also has a long history in the study of Luke-Acts. VERNON K. ROBBINS: LUKE-ACTS IN SYMBIOSIS WITH ROME Despite the silence on the part of Pao and Bonz regarding the implications of their work on Luke-Acts and the Roman Empire, scholars of Luke-Acts have actually been making intermittent but rather persistent comments since the eighteenth century that Luke-Acts should be read as a defense of the church to dispel Roman suspicions or hostilities. This has much to do with the work of C. A. Heumann. Heumann, in a short article in 1720 on Theophius (Luke 1:1–4; Acts 1:1–2), suggested that Theophilus was a Roman magistrate who received from Luke an apologia. Flipping targets but not really the message regarding the church’s ability or desire to coexist harmoniously with Rome, Paul W. Walaskay argues that Luke-Acts is not an apologia pro ecclesia to Rome but an apologia pro imperio to the church. 36 According to Walaskay, church communities, by reading Luke-Acts, would or should come to the understanding that the Roman Empire could offer them more help than hindrance. After giving a nod to acknowledge the work of Heumann and Walaskay, Vernon K. Robbins proposes that they both mistake Luke-Acts as “a defensive narrative”; instead, Robbins wants to clarify and show that Luke-Acts is “an aggressive narrative in an environment perceived to be teaming with opportunities.” 37 This is a far cry from Burrus’s reference to Scott’s “hidden transcript.” Moreover, in diametric opposition to Prior’s reading of LukeActs as transcending territories or de-territorializing and so a key remedy for “promised land” narratives or colonial ideologies, Robbins sees Luke-Acts as a “narrative map of territoriality for the development of Christian alliances throughout the eastern Roman Empire.” 38

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Instead of referencing Bhabha’s mimicry theory as Burrus does, Robbins makes his argument by way of René Girard’s work on mimetic desire. Quoting Girard, Robbins explains: [T]he subject desires the object because the rival desires it. In desiring an object the rival alerts the subject to the desirability of the object. The rival, then, serves as a model for the subject, not only in regard to such secondary matters as style and opinions but also, and more essentially, in regard to desires. 39

Like Burrus, Robbins observes that a good number of Roman imperial officers and representatives show up in Luke-Acts. More specifically, Robbins points out that Luke-Acts begins with a reference to Emperor Augustus (Luke 2:1) and then Emperor Tiberius (Luke 3:1); it also starts with events taking place in Syro-Palestine but ends with Paul in Rome because of his appeal to Caesar (Acts 28:19, 31). This means that Luke-Acts “is focused on Rome’s successful establishment of power from Rome to Jerusalem,” thus ending up “yok[ing] Christianity to Rome’s success by inverting the process . . . by showing the expansion of Christianity from Jerusalem to Rome.” 40 Again, just as Burrus does, Robbins looks at the Roman centurions in LukeActs. However, in contrast to Burrus’s suggestion, Robbins makes not an ambivalent assessment but an authoritative argument. 41 Particularly, he looks at the unnamed centurion in Luke 7 and Cornelius in Acts 10. In the first story, the centurion, in a way similar to how the Roman emperors function in Luke-Acts, never meets Jesus but only works behind the scene. The centurion asks, first, some Jewish elders, and, then, some friends to communicate what he wants to say to Jesus. Jesus, in response, first expresses willingness to go with the elders to the centurion’s house to help but, second, ends up following the imperial imperatives brought by the centurion’s friends—“Say the word, and let my servant be healed” (Luke 7:7)—and performs a long-distance healing. Given the centurion’s rationale or analogy of why Jesus need not go to his house to take care of business (Luke 7:8), the episode, Robbins explains, basically presents both the centurion and Jesus as brokers who transmit commands and power in a similar manner. Just like the centurion who brokers between the Roman emperor and the people within the Roman Empire (including the Jewish people), Jesus brokers between God and people within God’s world (including the centurion). In the second episode, Cornelius and Peter do meet face to face, but Robbins observes that Luke is once again making a kind of comparison between them by having Peter refuse Cornelius worship and acknowledge that they are both only humans (Acts 10:25–26). Not to be missed in these two stories involving a Roman centurion is, according to Robbins, how Luke similarly emphasizes both centurions as being benefiters to and well-liked by the Jewish people (Luke

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7:4–5; 10:2). 42 What is different between these two episodes is that, in contrast to the initiative of communication being taken by the centurion behind the scene in Luke 7, it is God who sends a separate message to Cornelius and to Peter in Acts 10. Since both Cornelius and Peter respond favorably to God’s message, Robbins suggests that this episode shows not only “the symbiotic relation of power structures in the Roman empire and Christianity” but also that God is the one who oversees this symbiotic relationship. 43 With God as the overseer, Luke has what Robbins calls “a strategy of territoriality that begins through God’s empowering of leaders in the Jerusalem temple and continues in synagogues, houses, and public areas from Galilee and Judea to Rome.” 44 Not only does this territorial expansion look like that of the Roman Empire (albeit in the opposite or reversed direction), but Robbins argues that this expansion of the church also operates by the same three tactics employed by the Romans: (1) open up boundaries by working through negotiation; (2) deploy local forces to create a sense of being omnipresent; and (3) grant citizenship and its accompanying privileges to those who show allegiance. 45 One finds in Luke-Acts, for instance, (1) not only the church’s negotiation with Gentiles but also Paul’s negotiations with the Pharisees (Acts 15; 23); (2) Jesus’s sending out of his followers (Luke 9:1–6; 10:1–11), as well as Peter’s and Paul’s setting up of local congregations; and (3) the church’s growth through its acceptance of various peoples. In addition to demonstrating Roman tactics of territorial expansion, LukeActs also features the same goals—“salvation” and “peace”—as the Roman Empire (Luke 1:76–79; Acts 9:31; 28:28). 46 Robbins writes: Christians, then, have nothing against the law of Jews, against the temple, or against Caesar (Acts 25:8). They simply do the work they are commanded to do. Christians function much like people who receive commands from officials in positions of higher authority in the Roman military and legal system. Christians, like people who are part of the Roman system, are set under authority and often have people under them who help with the work. 47

RUBÉN MUÑOZ-LARRONDO: LUKE-ACTS AND RESISTANCE Appealing, as Burrus does, to both Scott and Bhabha, Muñoz-Larrondo sees Acts as “a hidden transcript of resistance” that speaks subtly against “two centers of power: the Roman Empire and the institutions that define Judaism.” 48 To support his claim, Muñoz-Larrondo, like Pao and Bonz, refers to both Jewish Scriptures and Greco-Roman writings as intertexts to read Acts, though MuñozLarrondo does so in the name of Said’s “contrapuntal” reading. 49 According to Muñoz-Larrondo, the episodes about Peter’s rescue from jail and Herod’s death in Acts 12 were both type-scenes from Jewish Scriptures to show (1) God’s

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rescue of those who trust and depend on God (e.g., Exodus); and (2) God’s punishment of those who usurp divine prerogatives or exalt themselves as divine (e.g., Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28, Daniel 4). 50 For Muñoz-Larrondo, Herod, as a client king of Judea under Rome but facing a fate like a fallen Satan being cast out of heaven (Luke 10:8), is also functioning in Acts as representative of both Roman and Jewish authorities that oppose God. 51 Referring to various Greco-Roman writings (e.g., Augustus’s Res Gestae), Muñoz-Larrondo points to what Acts, as a “hidden transcript,” is really targeting: imperial cults that worshipped the Roman emperors as gods. 52 Though Acts may read like an apologia to imperial Rome to some, the book is quite clear, at least in Muñoz-Larrondo’s reading, that “it is necessary to obey God rather than human powers (4:12; 5:29).” 53 Muñoz-Larrondo writes, “I suggest that the Christian community in Acts stands in opposition to the Empire and thus [is] a highly politicized entity . . . yet not to the point of violent revolution.” 54 In other words, the writing of Acts may be ambiguous as Burrus suggests, but Muñoz-Larrondo’s reading of it is not ambivalent as Burrus’s reading does. In fact, as he concludes his chapter on Roman imperial worship, Muñoz-Larrondo criticizes scholars who feel or stay ambivalent about whether emperors claimed divinity when they were still alive as only “try[ing] to safeguard their reputations as postmodern, free-thinkers.” 55 CONCLUSION Viet Nguyen has argued in his book, Race and Resistance, that Asian American critics have for too long scrutinized texts “as demonstrating either resistance or accommodation to American racism.” 56 For Nguyen, this essentializes Asian American writings and communities and thus runs the risk of duplicating an exclusionary politics through a rigid and binary ideological structure, since model minority performance, as Nguyen has learned from Bhabha’s theory of mimicry, may still destabilize a dominant narrative such as the one about “unassimilatable Asians.” 57 Nguyen further suggests that Asian Americans might pursue both resistance and accommodation simultaneously, or shift from one course of action to another at different times. 58 In fact, Nguyen accuses Asian American critics for having a tendency to disavow their own accommodation, particularly their own investment in neoliberal capitalism through their publications and, hence, in their disciplinary and career advancements. 59 I bring this up because many still tend to read the Bible in similarly simplistic ways: Does it teach us to resist or submit to empire? I hope I have managed to remind us through my example of Luke-Acts that the New Testament can present quite a challenge to readers who seek textual meaning in such simplistic terms. Prior is correct about the significance of genres. Gospels, as narratives or stories about Jesus, do not give straight forward instruc-

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tions or opinions. 60 Add to the question of genre the linguistic, cultural, and temporal distance between the biblical writings of old and readers of today, contemporary readers of the Bible must do a lot of work and exercise quite a bit of creativity to make meaning out of what is printed on a page. As Mary Louise Pratt points out, readers are, therefore, not passive receivers but active producers who often make different, even opposing meanings from the same page or passage. 61 The scholars I surveyed above also show that readers of Luke-Acts read differently, even if they share the same gender, race, or minoritized status. With more theoretical and theological arguments than I am offering here, Dale B. Martin has proposed repeatedly that readers make meanings out of the Bible—he calls the idea that the Bible can speak in and of itself without human interpretations “the myth of textual agency.” 62 While Martin’s concern is about gender and sexuality, Albert Harrill has also used the nineteenth-century debates over slavery in the United States as a case study to show that the Bible does not “solve” moral debates, as readers can refer to different data or even the same data to make opposing arguments. 63 Leng Leroy Lim has suggested that those who teach the Bible as Wizards of Oz need to “come out from behind the curtain.” 64 I have tried to show here that we must acknowledge the same dynamics when we talk about the so-called biblical views about empire. As desirable as it may be, I have resisted the temptation to suggest that Luke-Acts or the New Testament is really not in support of empire and imperialism. Far more important in my view is for us to acknowledge our roles and hence our responsibilities as readers of the Bible. My emphasis on readers and reading does go back to my own understandings of the Bible. Besides its diversity in content and its ambiguity as text, the Bible is, for me, not a blueprint; that is to say, it is not something that we use to think for us. The Bible is, instead, something for me to think with, and I think with the Bible not for the purpose of commending or condemning someone, some story, some passage, or some book as a good resister or a bad collaborator as if those are the only two available and neatly separable choices, but to reaffirm my need to think and work with others to make ethically or morally responsible choices. Come to think of it, the Bible itself is, in a sense, yet another “myth of origin,” if I may go back to Prior’s vocabulary. While many may see the Bible as the basis or the origins of their faith, the writings in the Bible were actually written and collected as an expression or affirmation of an already existing faith, 65 not to mention how the so-called Bible is constantly being repackaged, reproduced, and hence redacted and revised. 66 The Bible is not a fixed origin or an unchangeable standard that speaks univocally about empire or independently of its readers. Saying simply that the Bible, in general, or the New Testament, in particular, is for or against empire may garner atten-

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tion or, as Nguyen suggests, bring about advancements, but it is not intellectually honest. NOTES 1. This chapter is a condensed version of “Bible and Colonialism: What Does the New Testament Really Say?” in Colonialism and the Bible: Contemporary Reflections from the Global South, edited by Tat-siong Benny Liew and Fernando F. Segovia, xxxiii–lxi (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018). 2. While Prior does reference the scholarship of Edward W. Said a few times (Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997], 138, 261, 282), Prior’s book does not really engage what has already become in the 1990s a burgeoning field of postcolonial studies. 3. José Oscar Beozzo, “Humiliated and Exploited Natives,” in 1492–1992: The Voice of the Victims, edited by Leonardo Boff and Virgil Elizondo, 78–89 (Philadelphia: Trinity International, 1990), cited in Prior, The Bible and Colonialism, 66. 4. Prior, The Bible and Colonialism, 13, 209. For other factors or facilitating forces that help bring about colonialization, see Jared Diamond, Gun, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Musa W. Dube has also suggested economics (“gold”), religion (“God”), narcissism (“glory”), and masculinity (“gender”) as causes; see Musa Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretations of the Bible (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2000). 5. Prior, The Bible and Colonialism, 71–72, 92, 106, 174–213. 6. Ibid., 185–208. 7. Ibid., 216–52, 259. 8. Ibid., 265. 9. Ibid., 294 (emphasis original). 10. Ibid., 284–85. 11. Ibid., 99–100, 285–86. To be fair, Prior does characterize the Hebrew prophetic tradition as “more universalist” than the Torah or the Hexateuch and makes a point to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism (169, 209–11). However, he also sees universalism as having been “raised to a new intensity in the universalism of Jesus and the New Testament,” and writes that a “Christological and messianic interpretation of the Old Testament allows these books to show forth their full meaning in the New Testament,” and that, after all is said and done, there are “fundamental differences between the world view reflected in the writings of the New Testament and that perpetuated within Rabbinic Judaism” (271, 283–85). 12. Prior, The Bible and Colonialism, 16–46, 253–86. Just to give one example of Prior’s acknowledgment that even his Catholic Old Testament contains diverse materials, he refers to Bartolomé de Las Casas’s citing chapters from the biblical book of Job, Sirach, and the “Hebrew prophetic tradition” to criticize the treatment of American Indians by his fellow Christian colonialists in the sixteenth century (57–60). Note, however, that Prior’s emphasis here is more on what passages of the Bible were read by different readers, and less on how different readers might read the same biblical passages differently. According to Prior, people debating colonialism in Latin America “used those portions of the Scriptures which supported their own stance,” even though he also makes the observation on the very same page that those who used the Bible to support colonialism “were reading the Bible with Israelite, rather than Canaanite eyes” (62; cf. 70, 102–3). Reading Exodus with Canaanite eyes implies, of course, that a reader may read a text through a different lens, including reading it against the grain, to come up with an opposing interpretation. Elsewhere in his book, Prior also connects Zionism with what he calls “a literalist interpretation of the biblical witness to land and of some of its messianic texts” (171), the “extermination” of indigenous populations with a “simplistic reading of [biblical] traditions” (263), and “major errors” with a “naïve interpretation” (263); if so, then one may well wonder what may result if we approach the same text with other, non-literalist, more

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nuanced, or less naïve interpretations. Prior does mention allegorical ways of reading, though he quickly adds that such ways are “very much out of vogue today” (272). 13. Prior, The Bible and Colonialism, 292–93. 14. Ibid., 104–5. 15. Ibid., 45. 16. David W. Pao, Acts and the Isaianic New Exodus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 111–248. 17. Pao, Acts and the Isaianic New Exodus, 59–68. 18. Prior, The Bible and Colonialism, 285. 19. Pao, Acts and the Isaianic New Exodus, 51–59. 20. Marianne Palmer Bonz, The Past as Legacy: Luke-Acts and Ancient Epic (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 16. 21. Ibid., 20; see also 1–25, 29, 183–93. 22. Ibid., 19, 23, 26. Bonz proposes that Luke had precedents to follow, as there were other attempts to adapt Virgil’s Aeneid in the first century CE (see Bonz, The Past as Legacy, 27–29, 61–86). 23. Ibid., 31–60, 87–94. 24. Ibid., 129–83. 25. Ibid., 95–128. 26. Prior, The Bible and Colonialism, 220–21. 27. Virginia Burrus, “The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles,” in A Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings, edited by Fernando F. Segovia and R. S. Sugirtharajah (New York: T & T Clark, 2007), 134–35. 28. Ibid., 138–39. 29. Ibid., 136–37, 139–40; see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 30. Burrus, “The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles,” 134, 146–48; see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge 1994), 121–31. 31. Burrus, “The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles,” 145–48. 32. Ibid., 133, 145, 177; see Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 33. Burrus, “The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles,” 146–47; see also 134, 139. Burrus gives several more examples of her ambivalent assessment of Luke’s ambiguous message, such as the story of Paul and two women—a slave girl and the Gentile merchant, Lydia— in Philippi in Acts 16 and its implication on Luke’s view of the Roman economy (150–52; 140–44), or the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 in terms of Luke’s view on the Christian mission as a(nother) colonial enterprise (149–50). 34. Burrus, “The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles,” 152. 35. Rubén Muñoz-Larrondo, A Postcolonial Reading of the Acts of the Apostles (New York: Peter Lang, 2012). 36. Paul W. Walaskay, “And so we came to Rome”: The Political Perspective of St. Luke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 5–14. 37. Vernon K. Robbins, “Luke-Acts: A Mixed Population Seeks a Home in the Roman Empire,” in Images of Empire, edited by Loveday Alexander (Sheffield: JSOT, 1991), 203. 38. Ibid. 39. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 145; cited in Robbins, “Luke-Acts,” 204. 40. Robbins, “Luke-Acts,” 205. 41. Ibid., 208–10. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 210. 44. Ibid., 215. 45. Ibid., 218–21. 46. Ibid., 220–21. 47. Ibid., 217.

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48. Muñoz-Larrondo, A Postcolonial Reading of the Acts of the Apostles, 1, 231; see also 226. 49. Ibid., 3–5; see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 66–67. 50. Muñoz-Larrondo, A Postcolonial Reading of the Acts of the Apostles, 43–74. 51. Ibid., 70–71. 52. Ibid., 75–116. 53. Ibid., 231. 54. Ibid., 73. Muñoz-Larrondo spends an entire chapter on how Acts portrays Roman authorities (175–229). Reading Acts sequentially, Muñoz-Larrondo observes that Roman authorities who appear in Acts to either oppose Christians or to intervene in conflicts involving followers of “the Way” become higher and higher in rank, but this phenomenon only functions rhetorically in Acts to show the Romans as not only “fighting against God” (Acts 5:39) but also being impotent to stop God’s plan and work (Acts 2:23). 55. Muñoz-Larrondo, A Postcolonial Reading of the Acts of the Apostles, 115. 56. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7. 57. Ibid., 11, 50–54, 132–33, 168. 58. Ibid., 144–45. 59. Ibid., 58. 60. The other two genres of the New Testament do not make things easier. Letters are difficult to read, as we are getting only one side of the conversation. Apocalypse, with its codes, symbols, and verbal pictures, is known for its opacity to readers. 61. Mary Louise Pratt, “Interpretive Strategies/Strategic Interpretations: On AngloAmerican Reader Response Criticism,” Boundary 2.11 (1982–1983): 201–31.While Pratt, in that same article, recommends the importance of making strategic interpretations, we must keep in mind that what counts as “strategic” also varies with different readers. 62. Dale B. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 1–16. 63. J. Albert Harrill, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 10 (2000): 149–86. 64. Leng Leroy Lim, “‘The Bible Tells Me to Hate Myself’: The Crisis in Asian American Spiritual Leadership,” Semeia 90 (2002): 320. 65. Dale B. Martin, Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-First Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 71–110. 66. Timothy Beal, “Beyond Reception History: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures,” Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011): 357–72.

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Index

accommodation(ist), 90, 174 activism, activist, 20, 41, 44, 112, 135, 136 alienation, 26, 143, 145 ambivalence, 169–170 anarchy, 18, 28 ancestors, 2–3, 113 annihilate, 165 antisemitism, 41, 43 apartheid, 111, 151, 159–160, 166 appropriation, xv, 6, 42–45, 150, 159, 168 assimilation, 67 aural, 112, 152

contestable, contestation, contested, 31, 156, 157, 158–159 contextual(ization), 1, 10, 42, 139, 142, 160 contrapuntal, 173 cooperation, 73 covenant, 6, 25, 26, 153 credo, 5 crowd(s), 26, 36, 52, 54, 55, 63, 170 cult(s), 136, 167, 173 cultivation, 21 cultural: aristocracy, 144; artifact, 44; domination, 31; hegemony, 140; industry, 143; inheritance, 138; lies, 20; object, 136; representation, 145; understanding, 31; web, 144 curse(s), cursed, 25, 105, 106

banquet, xv, 47–56, 65 broker(s), 169, 172 butterfly, 17–18, 24, 28 carnival, 83, 84 chaos, chaotic, 18, 19 charity, 68 chrysalis, 17, 18 classism, 106 climate change, xiv, 119, 124–126 collaboration, 67, 140, 152 collectors, 1, 2, 3–4, 6–8, 10, 12, 18, 41–45, 49 communitarian(ism), xi companion(s), companionship, 66, 74 consumption, 126, 127, 128, 135–136, 137, 138, 140, 145

darkness, 38, 95 dignity, 20, 25, 50, 80, 126 discernment, xi, 25, 137 displacement(s), 139, 144 dispossession, 8 domestication, 42–45, 65, 138 domination, 20, 23, 26–27, 28, 31, 32, 50, 59, 62, 65, 67, 83, 89, 96, 106, 114, 115, 131, 143, 154 dualism, 91–92 election, 41, 98, 99, 166, 168

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190 empathetic, empathize, empathy, 18, 19–20, 22, 23, 24, 28, 129 emperor(s), 36, 38, 48, 50, 51, 61, 64, 66, 90, 172–173 eunuch, 64, 69–70 execution, 48, 53, 62, 63 exploitation, 31, 38, 98, 121, 126, 129, 136, 141, 156 famine, 6, 55, 73, 157–158 feast, 47 firstborn, 6, 7 foundation(s), 18, 20, 21, 90, 109, 168 fragile, 20 fundamentalism, 141–142 gay, 44, 70 genderism, xiv, 104, 106, 111–112, 113 genocide, 32, 67, 68, 103 gift(s), gifted, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 20–28, 60, 70, 94–95, 107, 120, 128, 131 grassroots, 114, 135 guerilla, 62 healing, 26–27, 75, 121, 131, 172 heathen, 104 hegemonic, hegemony, 91, 96, 98, 99, 103–112, 115–116, 136, 140, 143, 145 hidden transcripts, 3, 170, 171, 173 homeland, 2–3, 5, 94 hope, 38, 62, 68, 73, 75, 77, 78–83, 112, 123, 130, 131 hospitality, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 47 incarnation, 65, 110 inculturation, 139, 145, 150 indigenous, 2, 3, 5, 26, 31, 69, 119, 142 insecurity, 17 insurrection, 48 intersection, 5, 51, 142, 150 intertext(s), 52, 76, 167, 168, 170, 173 intervention(ist), 34, 89, 136, 140, 141, 142, 145, 153 invade(d), 2, 104, 120 Islamophobia, 43, 98 justice, xi, xii, xv, 20, 25, 26, 32, 34, 37, 62, 75, 99, 110, 114, 119, 120, 121, 122–124, 125, 126, 128, 132, 136, 170

Index labor, 35, 103, 105, 119, 120 land(s), landed, land grabbing, 2–8, 31, 34, 35–36, 48, 52, 54, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 75, 80, 104, 105, 107–108, 119, 121, 126, 127, 135, 154, 156, 157–158, 165–167 laugh(ter), 79, 83, 84 liberation, 32, 36, 38, 77–78, 89, 103, 110, 135, 145, 150–151, 160 makapili, 67 manipulation, 23, 25, 28, 62 media(s), mediatic, 136, 137–141, 143–144 merchandise, 135, 137 mercy, 38, 51, 75, 76, 137 metanarrative(s), 18–20 metanoia, 49 Mga may Akda, 8, 10 mimic(s), mimicking, mimicry, xiv, 65, 68, 91, 93–94, 170, 172, 174 misogynist, misogyny, 45, 98 multicultural, 42 murga, 73, 83–84 myth(s), mythic, mythological, 3, 12, 33, 80, 82, 145, 157, 165, 175 national, nationalism, nationalist, nationalization, nationality, 3, 4, 11, 41–42, 43–44, 52, 60, 70, 98, 99, 115, 125, 136, 143, 153, 154, 155, 158–160, 165, 166 native, 2–8, 42, 43, 52, 67, 68, 104, 110, 169 negotiation, 3, 11–13, 73, 173 neighbour, 119–120 occupation, 3, 27, 34, 44, 165–166 occupy(ing), 2, 18, 34, 52, 60, 107–108, 121 ochlos, 26 opposition, 18, 41, 73, 77, 82, 170, 171, 173 oral(ity), 3, 12–13, 112, 152 pagan(s), 104, 121 Palestine, 3, 4, 7, 8, 42, 60, 165 parasite, 137, 154 parody, 73, 76–83, 84, 155, 170

Index people of the land, 2, 3, 35, 36 perversion, 136, 144 pleasure, 31, 143 poor, 11, 18, 20, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 68, 112, 121–122, 125, 130, 139, 141, 144, 151, 152, 160 profit, 120, 122, 127, 128, 138 propaganda, 11, 20, 22, 23, 50, 56, 62, 90, 143 protest(ing), 12, 36, 41, 66, 84, 110, 129 punishment, 33, 34, 173 racism, 41, 42, 43, 44, 98, 104, 105, 109, 113, 174 Rastafari(an), 5, 108, 109, 113 reconciliation, 18, 23, 26, 35, 97, 98 Reformation, 43, 137 refuge(es), 18, 53, 56, 98, 125 reggae, 113 rehabilitate, 166, 167 retaliation, 20, 62 retribution, 139 satire, 73, 76, 84 seize(d), 2, 62, 120 shaking, 18, 119 silence(d), xi, 1, 8, 20, 28, 75, 76, 140, 142, 171 slavery, 35, 41, 42, 45, 67, 103, 104, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 120, 129, 175 sojourners, 93–94, 98 solidarity, xiii, 2, 6, 11, 18, 19, 20–23, 26, 28, 131, 139, 158 strangers, 94, 169

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struggle(s), xiii, xv, 10, 17, 24, 31, 32, 36, 44, 51, 98, 99, 114, 135, 141, 142, 144, 146, 149–160 subjugation, 65 subordination, 59, 65, 89, 103, 114 subversion, subversive, 110, 170 sweatshop, 119 talanoa, 4, 12–13 terra nullius, 3 territory, territoriality, territories, 7, 34, 52, 53, 103, 104, 105, 115, 136, 140, 166, 171, 173 toilet, 8, 9, 10 torture(d), 50, 62 trauma(tic), 20, 75 unatonement, 20–23, 24, 25 underdog, 60, 62 violence, 17, 21, 26, 33, 41, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51–53, 91, 97, 98, 114, 126, 131 vision, 9, 34, 38, 50, 67, 68, 78, 82, 98, 99, 112, 127, 130, 131, 140 vocation, 119, 140 vulnerable, 25, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127 West Bank, 7 whiteness, 42 wilderness, 45 working-class, 151, 160 xenophobia, xenophobic, 45, 165

About the Contributors

Graham J. Adams is a theological educator, specializing in missiology. He teaches at Luther King House (Manchester, UK) and the Congregational Institute for Practical Theology. His publications include Christ and the Other (2010), contributions to Bible and Theology from the Underside of Empire (2016) and Twenty-First Century Theologies of Religion (2016), and the Brill Research Perspective on “Theology of Religions” (forthcoming). Rogelio Dario Barolin is an Argentinian Old Testament researcher and pastor of a local congregation of the Waldensian Church in Uruguay. He also serves as executive secretary of AIPRAL (Alliance of Presbyterian and Reformed Churches in Latin America). His research focuses on the intercession of academic biblical research, the practices of local ministry of the church, with social and political realities. Nancy Cardoso Pereira is professor of ancient history at Porto Alegre Institute of the Methodist Church and a Methodist pastor who works in the ecumenical pastoral commission on land, based in Porto Alegre, Brazil. She has published in Portuguese and English around biblical interpretation, feminist, and queer theologies. Jin Young Choi, a native of South Korea, is associate professor of New Testament and Christian origins at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, New York. Choi is the author of Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (2015). She has actively served the Society of Biblical Literature as a former co-chair of the Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics steering

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194

About the Contributors

committee, and currently as a co-chair of the Minority Criticism and Biblical Interpretation group. Jione Havea is a native Methodist pastor from Tonga who lives between Sopu (Tonga), the shadows of Maungarei (Aotearoa), and Wurundjeri country (Australia), and serves as research fellow at Trinity Theological College (Auckland, Aotearoa) and with the Public and Contextual Theology research center (Charles Sturt University, Australia). Jione edited Postcolonial Voices from Downunder (2017), Sea of Readings: The Bible and the South Pacific (2018) and Religion and Power (Lexington/Fortress, 2018). Stephen C. A. Jennings is an ordained and accredited minister of the Jamaica Baptist Union for the past thirty years and is one of its past presidents (2008–2010). He is the pastor of the Mona Circuit of Baptist Churches in Kingston, Jamaica, where he has served since 1993. Jennings is adjunct graduate professor in biblical, historical, Caribbean, and contemporary theologies at United Theological College of the West Indies. His research interests include examining the links between religion(s) and theologies on the one hand, and on society, culture, economics, politics and globalization on the other. Tat-siong Benny Liew is Class of 1956 Professor in New Testament Studies at the College of the Holy Cross, United States. He is the author of What Is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics? (2008) and editor of several works including Present and Future of Biblical Studies (2018) and Colonialism and the Bible: Contemporary Reflections from the Global South (with Fernando Segovia; Lexington, 2018). Liew is also the executive editor of Biblical Interpretation (Brill) and the Series Editor of T&T Clark’s Study Guides to the New Testament (Bloomsbury). Néstor O. Míguez is a leader both in articulating an authentic Latin American reading of the Bible and in ecumenical efforts to strengthen theological education worldwide. He serves as professor of New Testament studies, Instituto Universitario ISEFT, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Míguez has published several works in both Spanish and English around New Testament studies and topics relating to empire, borders, and liberation. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda is professor of theological and social ethics at Church Divinity School of the Pacific. Her ethical approach weds Earth ethics to liberation theologies including eco-feminist theology. She is coauthor with Bruce Birch, Jacqueline Lapsley, and Larry Rasmussen of Bible and Ethics: A New Conversation (Fortress, 2018), and other books and numerous chapters and articles.

About the Contributors

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Raj Nadella teaches the New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary and is director of the MA(TS) degree program. He is the author of Dialogue Not Dogma: Many Voices in the Gospel of Luke (2012). He is currently working on a book titled Synoptics and the Empire and is coauthoring a textbook on postcolonial biblical studies. Janneke Stegeman is a Dutch theologian who specializes in the Old Testament. She was born in the village of Woudenberg in the middle of the Netherlands. She is interested in the interaction between religion and conflict, and indecent theology. She regularly gives lectures, preaches, and writes on these topics. With Mariecke van den Bergen Matthea Westerduin, Stegeman founded TITS (The Indecent Theology Society)/GeNOT (Genootschap voor Onbetamelijke Theology [Society for Impatient Theology]). Revelation Enriques Velunta is associate professor of New Testament and cultural studies at Union Theological Seminary, Philippines. He is coordinator of the Union Theological Open Seminary (UTOS) and director of the Master of Theology Program at Union. He serves as the Bible lecturer of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines’s Summer Internship Program and Bible in Context Seminar. His latest book is Reading the Parables of Jesus inside a Jeepney (2017). Gerald O. West is professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and African biblical hermeneutics in the School of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He is also director of the Ujamaa Centre for Community Development and Research, a project in which socially engaged biblical scholars and ordinary African readers of the Bible from poor, working-class, and marginalized communities collaborate for social transformation. His most recent publication is The Stolen Bible: From Tool of Imperialism to African Icon (2016).