SUMMARY
Historical observation makes plain that all empires fall. Moreover, throughout the biblical text there runs an anti-imperialist strand, pushing against the hubris and conceit of pharaoh, Babylon, Herod, and Rome. All their conceit finally fails them, and the systems of power of which they are both agents and pawns also fall, because no lord or authority or imperial might will stand against the triumph of the reign of God, in which all authority is handed over to the God and Creator of all things.
And to make such an observation is not a mere instance of Schadenfreude, an adolescent celebration at the misfortune of others. To take seriously the manner in which empires fall allows would-be Christians to configure the correct target for their labors: that the brilliance of our young need not be sacrificed to the strife of partisanship or to the military-industrial-congressional complex or to the dominance of global capitalism. To make such historical observations provides a more fruitful, nimble, and constructive ground from which to contribute to the good of the world.
EXPOSITION
The United States is an empire par excellence. It wields massive military force and economic power throughout the globe. Its military budget is not only more than that of any other country on the face of the planet, but its 2017 military budget was larger than the next seven largest military budgets combined, including China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany.1 “Make America Great Again,” within the context of such observations, sounds like the cry of an insecure imperialist. Insecure imperialists are highly dangerous and a threat to all manner of human goods.
Lord Acton is famed for having said that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” While his assertion is problematic on numerous levels, this conventional wisdom serves as a sort of signpost pointing to the recurring historical fact that empires often become the victim of their own greed and grabbing. There are those, of course, who believe the United States may have already reached the point of no return, in that it has grabbed for too much and the chickens are coming home to roost.
Whether this is the case or not, it is important to note that to take such a long view of human history is neither pessimistic nor unpatriotic. Nor does it indicate a lack of love for one’s country. It is simply a flat-footed realism that broadens the possibilities for construing the sociopolitical posture and possibilities of the Christian community.
Namely this: if (a) we recognize that Jesus explicitly rejected the so-called satanic imperialist shape for his kingdom, if (b) we recognize that the long history of the Christian church precedes the US empire, and if (c) we recognize that the Christian church shall extend well beyond the life cycle of the United States (for this is the very promise made to Peter by Jesus), then (d) we become free to be both judge and critic and contributor and citizen, knowing that the existence of the US empire is not our ultimate historical concern.
To be a truly conservative Christian, ironically, entails learning to do the same sort of sociopolitical critique that runs throughout Scripture. There is indeed an insistent critique of empire throughout the canon. In the Old Testament, pharaoh is the paradigmatic instance of arrogant imperialist might, finally reduced to nothing by the power of God and the indefatigable waves of history. Neither the hand of God nor the realpolitik of history will ignore the hubris of the mighty.
In some strange inversion of much ancient Christian and Jewish wisdom, critique of imperial might in our day has somehow been dubbed “liberal.” But it is clearly conservative with regard to the authority of Scripture. And it is clearly conservative with regard to American politics, for part of the genius of the early American experiment was its critique and rejection of arbitrary, capricious employment of power. George Washington’s counsel against standing armies and the Founding Fathers’ insistence on three branches of government were commitments to such critiques of the hubris of power. To be truly conservative in an American sense is to realize the ways in which all may be tempted, all parties from right or left may fall prey to grasping after power in seeking to impose its imperialist way.
And to be authentically conservative in a Christian sense is to make nonpartisan critiques of empire, with equal opportunity criticism of the imperialism of either right or left. It is neither naive nor idealistic nor the province of the haters to critique fetishes with military might, nationalism, and American exceptionalism. It is instead historically savvy, politically conservative, and theologically conservative. It may be, for example, an exercise of deep love for country to say with all earnestness that all this running after imperial self-interest and yet more ICBMs and nuclear warheads and strategic submarines is an exercise unto death, and the faster one runs thus, the more quickly come the death pangs.2
The persistent biblical critique of imperialist might begins with the Genesis account itself and runs on throughout the canon to the closing pages of the New Testament. We might even say it is one of the cords of biblical revelation never far from the surface, which helps hold the whole account together.
The biblical creation account, according to many Hebrew Bible scholars, was juxtaposed in subversive ways against the imperialist Babylonian myth, in which the mighty justified their violence and subjugation of the masses. The Babylonian creation myth told of a universe created out of a bloody mess, a so-called “ontology of violence.” The Babylonian mythology contended that the very nature of being was grounded in bloodshed and battle and war, that humans were created as a slave class to serve the victorious gods, and that the mighty—the priestly and the kingly class—imaged the gods, and thus the motley band of humans would need to serve the whims of the mighty.
Against such an imperialist ideology, the Genesis creation story depicted a so-called “ontology of peace,” in which the universe was ordered by the loving word of God and humankind lovingly created for communion with God, and, moreover, humankind—all humankind—was made an image of this loving God’s care and concern for all created things, good in themselves, indeed, very good.
With this sort of opening salvo against imperialist ideology, the cord runs on, page after page: the tower of Babel, a not-so-disguised critique of Babylonian pretense; the call of Abraham, called to leave his social and communal bonds that provided protection and plenty, and become a wanderer unto the call of God; the boy Joseph, unwittingly put in place by his envious brothers, to employ the power of empire for the good of the band of Hebrews, having been given the promise of God that they would be sustained by God’s promise and generosity and not their own might; the exodus from Egypt following the pharaoh who knew not Joseph and treated the Hebrews with contempt, treated them like cogs in his imperial wheels, caring neither for their bodies nor their souls but only their productive output for his mighty endeavors.
Pharaoh had grown testy and knew full well how to employ the immense catalyzing force of cultural fear: if the Hebrews continue to grow in number in our midst, then we may be outnumbered; they may grow envious and start caring about justice and rise up against us in war. In an act of cultural defensiveness grounded in imperialist fear, pharaoh enacts a policy of infanticide. (Let us never be so naive as to think that empires will care about the babies of their enemies. The Spanish conquistadors bashed the heads of indigenous Central American babies, the German Nazis burned and gassed the children of the Jews, and the American military incinerated the Japanese babies of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.)
It is worth pausing here to note that the battle with pharaoh, as depicted in the book of Exodus, is bloody and violent and apparently not even fair. (What does one do, for example, with the biblical contention that God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” on numerous occasions? And yet the text also notes, “And Pharaoh hardened his heart.” In any case, the look-on-my-works-ye-Mighty-and-despair pharaoh found himself in a battle that he was in no manner going to win.) It is bloody and violent, and yet the very people pharaoh feared would rise up in violence against him are commanded by their God to sit tight, to be still, and to let God do what God was going to do.
The task of the Hebrews during the exodus was to fear and obey God, and not to fear and obey pharaoh. When the Hebrew midwives are ordered to kill Hebrew baby boys at birth, they simply refuse to do so. And when the imperial authorities inquire as to their disobedience, these wily women poke fun at the authorities: “oh my, well, you know these Hebrew women are vigorous, not like your Egyptian women; the labor pains hit them, they send for us midwives to come, and before we can get there, they’ve delivered their babies and are back up and out working for you all, meeting their brick quotas, and no chance for us to surreptitiously strangle those babies.”
Thus pharaoh must up the ante. All right, then, when a Hebrew baby boy is born, you throw the child into the Nile. And it was by yet another wily act of resistance that the human deliverer of the Hebrews would find his way into the very halls of pharaoh’s power. Little Moses is “thrown into the Nile,” placed in a reed basket in the river, discovered by pharaoh’s daughter, and at the resourceful wit of sister Miriam, Moses’s mother gets put on the imperial payroll to nurse her own Hebrew baby boy, who would rise, in time, to call pharaoh to give an account that would lead to his great undoing and the deliverance of the Hebrews from their bondage.
One of the great ironies of the fall of the mighty: that which they inordinately fear often falls upon them. Their fears come upon them because of their own cowardice. Seeking to preempt that which they fear, they resort to injustice, violence, and oppression. Their focused energy brings the fear to life with a vigor and whirlwind perhaps not otherwise possible. Preemptive war is a privilege only of the mighty, a sowing of the wind to reap the whirlwind.
With the new life of Israel made possible, one great question in the unfolding narrative is whether Israel, with its hankering after having a king “like the nations,” will be the alternative to Egypt intended in its founding. Certainly as depicted in the book of Deuteronomy, Israel was constituted as an alternative to the oppressive ways of Egypt. In Egypt there was an incessant demand for more productivity, economic growth, and labor output, but in Israel the people would rest every seven days, precisely, says Moses in Deuteronomy, because “you were slaves in Egypt.” You were slaves in Egypt, but no longer. Put away the slave mentality and the social structures that make such a mentality possible. Instead, practice the liberating ways of this God who delivered you from such oppression. Learn to rest.
This very sabbath principle would be extrapolated into yet more economic and social practices: debts forgiven every seven years, the land allowed to lie fallow every seven years, indentured servants set free and given all they need to make their way in the world every seven years. In redemptive contrast to the ways of Egypt, the social and economic policies of the people of God were to embody a nonimperialist alternative.
Note that such distinctive social practices differ in marked ways from the policies of empire. Empires do not operate according to the ways of the God who delivers Hebrew slaves from the grasping hand of pharaoh. Empires do not forgive debt; they count on it. Empires, above all, are not willing to trust God to provide for their defense; they love accumulating to themselves vast might and power and glory.
Thus the biblical canon unfolds with continuing tales of kings thought mighty and empires thought impervious: Assyria with its bloodthirsty ways, whose king would set his throne before the gates of a newly conquered city, and there in his arrogant glory await his plunder, await his soldiers to pile up heads before him in a savage display of decapitation. Or the prophet Amos would denounce the brutality of the surrounding mighty nations: Damascus because “they have threshed Gilead with threshing sledges of iron” (Amos 1:3) or the Ammonites “because they have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead in order to enlarge their territory” (Amos 1:13).
In time the Babylonians would come stomping into Jerusalem, destroying the city, the walls, the temple, and carrying the people away into captivity, ruthless and merciless. And this tumultuous event—of being carried into exile—precipitated the great theological crisis of Israel’s history. How could the God of deliverance allow Judah to be carried into captivity? How could the God who threw pharaoh and his chariots and horses and riders into their grave in the Red Sea permit the wicked Babylonians to rise against them?
The Babylonians knew full well the irony. Or at least the book of Psalms provides evidence that the Babylonians knew the irony:
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land? (Ps. 137:1–4)
Assyrian soldiers carry severed heads of their prisoners from the town of “-alammu,” reign of Sennacherib, relief panel, 700–692 BC, from the Southwest Palace at Nineveh, British Museum, London. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasg). Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0
The mockery, the indignity, the violence of it all, and the utterly understandable fury that erupts:
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock! (vv. 8–9)
This horrific historical plunder of Israel—which continued even after the Persians allowed the people to return to Jerusalem—posed the great question of God’s working in the world over against the strutting might of the bloody empires of the world. Would God allow God’s people to continue to be dominated by the empires? Would the imperial word be the final word? Would the military might of the powerful determine the fate of human history or no?
By the time Jesus comes on the scene in first-century Palestine, there would have been many freedom fighters, numerous false messiahs, all seeking to undo the power of imperial might and kingly bloodletting, themselves often strung up to die and killed mercilessly. And when Herod the Great—that somewhat of a Jewish puppet-king of the Romans—hears from the wise men that a competing king had been born somewhere thereabouts, he plots to kill the newborn babe. But when his violence is foiled, he calls a play from pharaoh’s playbook and kills all the little ones in and around Bethlehem.
It would be this empire, and all empires, to which Jesus’s kingdom would be the great undoing. When Jesus went out preaching, he did not say, “Behold, I come declaring the true religion; embrace your personal relationship with me, and you shall enter heaven when you die.” When Jesus went out preaching, he did not say, “Behold, I come declaring to you the means for you to know personal fulfillment and calm your existential angst.” No, when Jesus went out preaching, he said, as the Synoptic Gospels summarize it: “Change! For God’s kingdom is here.”
Surely the truth revealed in Jesus does have a great deal to say to us about our personal communion with our Maker, and does have a great deal to say about our personal angst and struggles with our own mortality. But the declaration of the good news is summarized in the announcement of a new kingdom in which the bloodletting of history, the injustice of the nations, the brokenness of all manner of institutions, powers, and individual human lives are begun to be set right.
If we would be Christians, then, we must have faith to see the decline of empires—including those from which we may have derived many of our own benefits and power and personal privilege, often at the expense of others—as the inevitable consequence of the coming of God in Christ into the world. More, this does not even require Christian faith. This sort of realism about the manner in which might falls in upon itself is not a particularly novel observation, given that a simple historical survey indicates the inductively derived truth that all empires, in time, fall.
What is novel, of course, is the manner in which we are called to participate in the redemptive politics of the world. It is not through imperial might and military prowess but through the sort of servanthood and mercy exhibited in King Jesus. This is the great political fact to which all who follow Jesus must ultimately submit and thereby know a new and good life.
If the New Testament witness be true, it is the great political fact to which all human history will ultimately bend the knee and confess with the lips. And it invites us to the possibility of a nonpartisan contribution to the world in which we find ourselves, transcending the hostilities of left and right that shackle the imagination and political possibilities.
1. “U.S. Defense Spending Compared to Other Countries,” Peter G. Peterson Foundation, May 3, 2019, https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison.
2. See the immensely helpful work of Andrew Bacevich on this score, e.g., his The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008).